There’s a chinuch debate that splits well-meaning parents right down the middle: do you ban technology outright, hoping your child is simply never exposed — or do you train them to use it safely, knowing exposure is coming whether you like it or not?
Rabbi Lawrence Kelemen, teaching Rav Wolbe’s approach, comes down firmly on one side. Banning doesn’t work, he says, because it rests on a fantasy: that you can fully control your child’s exposure to the internet. “If you think you can protect your child from ever being exposed to the internet, you’re living in a different century. That’s a lost battle.” The real question isn’t whether your child will encounter it — it’s whether you trained them for the moment they do.
Kelemen’s model for that training is deceptively simple: treat the internet like a gun in the house. A responsible family doesn’t pretend the gun isn’t there. They lock it up, set airtight rules, and make sure every child in the house internalizes them: it never comes out without a parent present, it’s never pointed at anyone, it’s always treated as dangerous. The child who gets hurt around a gun is almost always the child who was never taught the rules — not the child who was trained.
Applied to screens, this becomes a concrete household code: no internet without a filter, ever — “there’s no such thing as internet without a filter” in a Torah home. No private browsing, even with a filter — devices live in public spaces. These aren’t arbitrary restrictions; they’re the “halachos” of technology use, taught early and enforced consistently, the same way gun safety rules are taught before a child is ever near a gun.
Kelemen backs this with real research: he authored an early, once-controversial article — now widely reprinted — cataloguing the specific risk factors that make some children far more vulnerable to online harm than others. The encouraging part: many of those risk factors are things a family can actually address.
**Concrete steps to inoculate your children, starting today:**
1. **Put filters and rules in place now**, before a crisis forces your hand — regardless of your child’s age.
2. **Keep devices in public spaces only.** No bedrooms, no closed doors, no private browsing — full stop.
3. **Teach the rules explicitly**, the way you’d teach gun safety: state them out loud, repeat them, don’t assume they’re understood.
4. **Learn your own family’s risk factors.** Read up on what actually predicts vulnerability, and address what’s in your control — connection, supervision, and household culture matter more than any single filter.
The goal isn’t to raise a child who’s never touched a screen. It’s to raise a child who already knows exactly how to handle one before the moment arrives.
For more of Rabbi Kelemen’s grounded, research-backed Torah guidance on raising resilient kids, join the inner circle at lawrencekelemen.com.
This blog was co-written with Artificial Intelligence.