(upbeat music) - Francis Chan joins us one more time from San Francisco as our guest on the Ask Pastor John podcast. Francis, I want to conclude our episodes with you by asking about parenting in the digital age. You have six kids and number seven is on the way. As a dad, I find this to be one of the biggest struggles in parenting.

Have you and Lisa found any keys to setting parameters around the time your kids spend on screens, computers, devices, and video games in their leisure time? - I'm pretty authoritative in the house. So if I say, look, you know, you got 45 minutes a day or an hour a day, you know, that's just the way it's gonna be.

And they just, they know better than to argue with that. But you know, what I will say about the whole computer, iPad, movies, video games is a lot of that is our fault. We can't blame it on the kids. We get too busy to parent. And so we let the videos keep them occupied.

So, you know, in our home, we do limit their time and we monitor what they watch. But so much of it is me. Like I need to go out, grab my son and throw the football. I need to grab my daughter, take her out to dinner, go to the beach.

We need to interact with them. The other thing, the reason why this is so important too is I'm meeting more and more kids that don't know how to talk to people. They don't know how to interact. It's like they don't even wanna look up from their screen. And we have to remember, okay, I don't know, I don't hear a lot of people talk about this, but it hurts the kingdom when we raise socially awkward children.

We need to raise kids who know how to interact, how to have conversations with believers and unbelievers. I mean, we're raising soldiers, we're raising missionaries. Our job is to get these kids to where they can get into the world and start conversations with people and bring the light of Jesus and the message of the gospel to them.

And so to me, the big crime in the video game stuff, it's not just that they're attached to the screen, but that they're not being useful for the kingdom in conversing with people. And it distracts them in their prayer lives and they can't have that singular focus of what it looks like to just be quiet in a room adoring Jesus and enjoying his presence.

- That is wise counsel to end on. Thank you, Francis, and thank you for joining us this week. Francis and his wife, Lisa, are the authors of the new book, You and Me Forever, Marriage in Light of Eternity. It's definitely worth checking out. And we will return tomorrow with Pastor John Piper.

I'm your host, Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast. (gentle music) (gentle music)