“EVERY Parent Needs to Watch This.” Those words caught my attention when I spotted them in an email sent to me by a friend from church. A retired military sharphooter who is no stranger to difficult and dark stuff, this one caught him off-guard. . . taking him into a world that he admitted was unfamiliar. “Have you heard of this stuff?!?” was his bewildered question to me last Sunday morning. I asked him to email me the link to the podcast episode to which he was referring so that I could carve out some time to listen.
His follow-up email had the link to episode #284 of the Shawn Ryan show, a podcast I had never heard of or watched before. When my daughter-in-law texted me a link to the very same podcast episode the next morning telling me I had to listen, I knew that this was something I needed to pay attention to. And so, I hit play for what has been my longest single podcast listening experience ever. . . a whopping four hours!
Truth be told, I had a bit of trouble sleeping after the experience for a few reasons.
First, the interview with the 22-year-old computer whiz known as Schlep pulled back the curtain on the deep dark world of online gaming and predatory grooming, especially in the highly popular Roblox platform. Chances are that if you’ve got kids they know about Roblox, and there’s a good chance they themselves are spending time. . . perhaps lots of time. . . playing any of the millions of games. Roblox, around since 2006, boats an average of 83.5 million daily active users. According to Wikipedia, the company claims a monthly player base that includes half of all American children under the age of 16. Now, go back and read that again. This episode was eye-opening, for sure.
Second, this was my first experience with Shawn Ryan. The former Navy Seal is a passionate man, and much of his passion is funneled into getting parents to wake up to what’s happening online. . . which is ultimately all about saving kids from the nightmares of online victimization, radicalization, grooming, and addiction. Fair warning: if you’re not fond of profanity – and you shouldn’t be – you’re going to hear alot of it during your four hours of listening. But that’s a small diversion that you should probably ignore as best you can so that you don’t miss out on a straightforward message and warning we all need to hear and heed!
Third, I was a bit restless about how to best communicate to parents and youth workers their need to listen to this episode. My fear is that I might get pushback on the profanity. But as an expression of shawn Ryan’s anger towards those undermingt the well-being of our kids and families, it drives home his points with extreme emphasis. . . but I’m not sure it’s even emphasis enough. My even bigger fear is that parents will ignore and not sit down to invest the time to listen tp a discussion that could serve to not only wake you up to the realities of life in today’s online world, but to actually save your kids and your familyfrom a lifetime of pain and heartache.
Sexually-groomed and abused through Roblox when he got on the platform at age 12, Ryan’s guest Schlep is now working to organize online sting operations, some of which have exposed predators who use Roblox, while pushing on Roblox to develop safety standards and protocols to protect our vulnerable young kids. In addition, he’s going public in order to warn parents.
It’s a tough listen people. But it’s one we need to go to, hitting play and sticking with it right up until the end. I’ve embedded the episode of the Shawn Ryan Show below.
And one last thing. . . a kind of parenting metaphor if I may. . .
Ever since we moved to our home almost 35 years ago, we’ve watched a mountain grow just a few miles down the road. When I’m paying attention, I see trucks from as far as away as New Jersey and Metro New York City and other urban areas heading up the road in our otherwise beautiful semi-rural area to dump loads of who-knows-what onto that mountain. As with all landfills, a crew is there everyday, covering up the who-knows-what with dirt, leaving a visual that could really fool you if you didn’t realize that it wasn’t a natural feature of the land, or even a man-made mountain. They do everything they can to disguise it. But those of us who are local know that it’s just a monstrous and growing-even-more-monstrous-by-the-day pile of who-knows-what. It’s a mountain of garbage. Get close to it and it smells. I have no idea what it’s doing to the water table and other natural resources in our area. When my wife and I take the rural roads that go past it, one of us always looks at the homes nearby it – many of which were there long before that mountain – and we wonder, “Why would anyone want to live near that garbage dump?!?” Then, last Sunday while out for a drive in our Jeep, we found ourselves on a road that sidled right up to the base of the mountain. And there, to our suprise, between the road and just a few yards away from the base of the mountain, sat a beautiful brand-new just-built home we had never seen before. As you might imagine our question this time was this: “What were they thinking?!?”
So here’s the moral of that story: We’re the house-builders and inhabitants. But when it comes to the online world of our kids we are ignorant, lazy, or we just don’t care. Lazy, ignorant, or not-caring about what? Well, I’m afraid that it’s not the garbage dump that’s close to our house. No, it’s the garbage dump we’re welcoming into our house.
Marshall McLuhan famously said, “First we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” . . . or mis-shape us.
Please take the time to listen. . .