Clean Heart Online

Parents

As the conversation on technology, family relationships, and connectedness continues, it’s tremendously helpful that families have new resources such as Covenant Eyes’ ebook CONNECTED: How Strong Family Relationships Lead to Internet-Safe Kids to help prioritize happy, healthy homes.

Today, our families are forced to begin having challenging conversations long before we feel emotionally ready for them. I am not yet a grandmother, but I imagine that some day soon, I will be a part of their faith formation. As such, I’ve already begun to think and pray about how I might handle the topics that challenge today's parents, including how to protect them from digital addiction. Whether accidentally or with intent, the day may well come when I am faced with helping my grandchild deal with the aftermath of exposure to pornography.

Imagining a world, particularly an online world, without pornography, is likely a dream rather than any near-term reality. However, hope is not lost, and neither is the potential to raise resilient and heroic kids, young men, and women that will carry on their parents', and ultimately Catholic, values. As parents, and even individually as fathers, we hope to pass on our values and morals to the next generation. Accountable families, particularly families with a strong faith foundation, can expect this and several other direct benefits from using Covenant Eyes.

We all have an identity. How God sees us, how others in society see us, and how we see ourselves. Throughout our lives, we experience many things that can have a lasting effect on how we see ourselves, and these can make their way into that mental file cabinet of the self. These beliefs about ourselves make up part of our “core beliefs.” Our core beliefs are what we really think deep down about God, other people, and ourselves. These beliefs have a direct connection to our behavior and relationships.

The consequences of pornography on the Internet generation are being discussed with more and more frequency at every level in the Catholic Church. Pope Francis has addressed pornography more times than any other Pope in the history of the Catholic Church. [..] When referencing Internet dangers, the Pope referred to it as “what is probably the most crucial challenge for the future of the human family.”