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iQuestions Faculty, Ted Baehr 
 
 
Question: 
 
As kids grow older do they become less susceptible to media 
influences? 
 
Answer: 
 
There’s a study out from USA Today, just the day that I’m doing this 
program, showing that teenagers’ brains are still developing. Actually, 
they’re developing way into their twenties. 
 
Teenagers think with the back of their brain—with their emotions, their 
cerebellum—instead of thinking with the logical aspects.  
 
So they get a lot of things wrong. They may speed up at a stop sign. 
They may do things wrong and you think: “How could they possibly do 
this?”  
 
It’s because they haven’t developed those conscience mechanisms. 
 
Does that mean that they can’t be taught to be media wise? No, they 
can be. But you have to take that into account.  
 
You have to help them understand where they are in their 
development and help them to be a little bit more careful and 
cautious, and to deal with some of their own changes in their life. Such 
as: they might be a little more self-centered than they need to be, and 
they need to be more careful about what’s going on around them. 
 
 
 
You can teach your children to be media wise so they become self-
regulating, so you don’t have to worry about them. You can do it. It 
can be done. It’s been done with children for a long time.  
 
A Cornell study shows that 90% of the kids abandoned their parents’ 
values. That’s because most of the parents just don’t know what to do. 
They become tolerant of everything.  
 
That is the worst thing you can do. 
 
You want to be intentional. You want to be in your children’s life, 
helping them to understand, setting them free intentionally, so that 
they develop values and become responsible. 
 
Intentionality is another word for loving your children. If you love your 
children you’re going to tell them: “Do your homework,” “Go to bed 
early,” “Brush your teeth.”  
 
They won’t always want to hear it, but those are the things that build 
into the patterns of life that will help them later on to not fall into the 
traps of the mass media—whether those are consumer traps or 
violence traps.  
Baehr -2- 
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