Your teenager might be wise and they might be mature beyond their years, but they’re still a teenager.
And when you hand them full access to social media, Snapchat, and the unfettered internet, you’re not just handing them a phone,
You’re putting them in a war.
A war between your child’s developing brain and billions of dollars in design, research, and algorithms created by trained professionals who want one thing: your child’s attention.
No teenager is equipped to win that battle.
Be the parent your teen desperately needs.
Get them off the screens. Say no to the madness. Pull them out. Take back your child.
The post above is typical of a particular “genre” of posts and articles circulating on the internet. These posts (and articles) portray modern technology and social media as boogeymen, and imply — when they don’t outright state — that we should just keep our children off of them altogether. Many convey an all-or-nothing situation (a logical fallacy called a “false dichotomy”) of either giving our children free reign of every social media platform known to man for 12+ hours a day, or being complete Luddites who withhold all access to all screens for any reason.
They’re right to raise concerns. They’re certainly right to call on parents to parent! But the alarmist, absolutist way they go about it is not only unhelpful; it has the potential to be downright harmful.
It’s our job as parents to train and equip our kids for living in the world they inhabit. That world is full of screens, so they need to be able to navigate that. Barring them from screens (or from social media) completely until they turn eighteen, then magically expecting them to know how to handle themselves is a recipe for disaster.
Instead of telling parents to avoid doing anything to train and equip their kids for living in a world that’s full of screens, it would be better to train their teens to exercise moderation, wisdom, and discernment in their approach to screens. That means suggesting standards by which people can evaluate their choices.
Social Media is What You Make of It
I’ve mentioned before that media is what you make of it. Social media is, likewise, largely what you make of it. People who use social media to surround themselves with bad influences and pursue shallow ends will have very different results than those who use social media to surround themselves with wisdom and pursue godly ends.
Since different platforms have different features and functionality, some are more conducive to edification than others. My teens all have Facebook. Nobody in my house has SnapChat. SnapChat offers a strong opportunity for hiding one’s words and actions, thus evading accountability and increasing temptation to ungodliness, and it doesn’t offer anything useful to us that we don’t already have in other platforms, so to us it’s not an overall positive.
Gradual Growth
Of course, using any tool wisely requires a degree of maturity. This is true of all things. I wouldn’t give a two-year-old $1000 to manage or leave him to cook dinner alone. That doesn’t mean money or cooking is bad — or that eighteen is the magic age at which they become acceptable. Wise parents introduce children to things like money, cooking, and sexual information gradually, as those children increase in growth and maturity.
We might give a preschooler $1 to manage, but guide a teen in managing $100s or $1000s. We might help the two-year-old cut a banana with a butter knife, let the six-year-old make his own peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, and allow the sixteen-year-old to cook dinner. We don’t just never let the child in the kitchen and then expect him to suddenly cook a full meal the day he turns eighteen.
A balanced approach to tech involves a similarly gradual approach. Children are given small doses of tech as they’re ready for it, and guided as they learn to handle it well.
In our house, that sometimes means some back and forth, especially where time spent on screens is involved, where the kids are allowed the freedom to do a little too much, so they can see the effects of too much screen time on their brains and mental health, and then pulled back before it becomes a long-term habit. As they learn to manage this time better for themselves, and to recognize the signs of excess in a timely manner, they can hold onto more freedom for longer. They need this training, though, so that as adults they’ll have the skill of managing their screen usage. (And this looks different for each child. Some of them naturally manage this pretty well, while others find it more of a challenge.)
Gradual introduction can also look like allowing limited social media access (e.g. Facebook but not SnapChat or TikTok) and overseeing the settings for and connections made through those accounts. Our teens’ Facebook accounts are locked down pretty tightly, and they don’t add friends we don’t approve.
Ongoing Vigilance
Some of what has been a net positive for our older teens is becoming less positive as platforms change their features and algorithms. We’re finding, for instance, that Facebook’s feed is less and less controllable. In the past, the feed was primarily populated by the people and companies or organizations a user followed, with ads being the only real outlier. Now, the things we choose to follow seem to comprise an increasingly smaller proportion of the feed and there’s a lot more being offered that we didn’t ask for and aren’t interested in. This shifts the balance of whether a user is being surrounded by wisdom or foolishness.
This kind of change is something we have to keep an eye on, because we might need to make changes to our own usage. If the Facebook feed becomes a negative influence, despite our best efforts, we might have to leave the platform. But this is not only a decision that a parent might need to make; it’s the kind of consideration a parent should be discussing with a teen. The awareness is just as important a lesson. When my teens become adults, they’ll no longer have me monitoring their influences; they’ll need the discernment to recognize for themselves that something previously edifying has become destructive. It’s not my job to merely impose this on them, but to help them see it.
Everyone’s Situation is Different
Every situation is different. Every child is different. My intent is not to tell you that your children should have access to exactly the same tech at exactly the same ages as ours do at our house. My goal is to encourage you to operate on the principle that some — careful, guided — experience with tech is an essential training tool for teens in any household that expects to operate within a high-tech world. (If you’re Amish or something, this may not apply to you. But I imagine no one reading this on a blog on the internet is that isolated from tech usage.)
The details of what that looks like in your home might not look like ours. But please don’t do your children the disservice of sending them into adulthood with no preparation for the world they live in.
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