social media | Serving North Central Austin

How about those Amish? Am I right? There is no argument that social media influences people, therefore, how do parents and children interact with social media from a godly perspective? It would be easy to fall on the extremes; social media will never enter my house or be completely consumed with social media but I think God’s Word provides an answer that is a little more complicated.

The pattern throughout God’s Word is to be sent out for His glory (Matthew 28.) I understand the desire to want to buy a piece of land in the middle of nowhere and create a commune of people who will keep our children safe but we know that isn’t true or realistic for most people.

Therefore, as followers of Jesus we have to wrestle with practical decisions of how we engage the culture of our day just like Jesus did in His day. Jesus was born into a point in history, lived under the rule of a government, interacted with the culture of the day, identified Himself with an ethnicity and yet Jesus came to establish His Kingdom on earth as it is in heaven, so what does that look like for us today as we raise children and interact with social media:

What does social media look like in your life personally as a parent? How much time are you on social media? What influence does social media have on you? The more we can understand the draw and allure of social media in our own life the easier it will be to guide our children.
We never wanted to give our children the impression that we were scared of social media. Social media isn’t greater than the glory of God. Social media isn’t the forbidden fruit that our children can never see. Social media is just a device but we want to have a plan for social media.
See this as discipleship. As parents, we get to disciple our children. We get to teach them about the world. We get to show them our love for Jesus and His Word is greater than anything we will ever find on social media. Is it hard? Yeah, it’s really hard but we can either equip our children to engage technology or they will leave our house one day and the world will disciple them in technology.
Create a vision for your child’s life. Start at 18 when they launch out of the home and write down what you want them to know, capable, understand, accomplish, and then reverse engineer what you need to teach them before they launch out of your home. We re-evaluated this goal every year and it shaped how we approached their teen years. When our children reached 16-18 we were able to clearly identify, “Do these things, be responsible in these areas, you get more freedom with social media and technology.”
Give them homework to learn about social media. They will roll their eyes but we teach our children how to do laundry, how to drive cars, how to brush their teeth; why wouldn’t we teach our children about social media. See resources at the end.
Delay social media as long as possible. If your child is asking for social media at 10 push it to 12. If they start asking at 13 push it to 16. It doesn’t matter what age they start, push it out as long as possible. Our goal was for our children to not get social media until they were 16.
Delay with crumbs. Our children started asking around 10 and we said, “Yeah, maybe one day?” The next time they asked we said, “Yeah, we should talk about that.” The next time they ask, “Yeah, we need to do that.” It’s not passive. It was our plan to push them off as long as possible and then we started with baby steps. Our 14-year old daughter started with a flip phone in 2017. Yeah, she hated it. But we said, “Let’s see if you can keep up with a flip phone and in time we can upgrade.” Then we upgraded to an iPhone Touch. She didn’t like that either but at least it looked like a phone. Our son started off with an iPhone, yeah his sister was bitter, but in the beginning he could only make calls, then he could text, then he could use the web but with screen time. His freshmen of high school year he got Instagram and his sophomore year we removed screen time. Their senior year of high school we remove all oversight and want them to experience complete autonomy before we launch them into the world.
Monitor usage. Our understanding from the very beginning was that everything online was public, so we can look at your phone at any moment, which means they are responsible for the decisions they make with the phone. You can look at the search history, their timeline will show you what they like to watch, their trash to see what they deleted are just a few ways to monitor their phones. When you see something that is concerning, use it as an opportunity to draw them out and ask questions. Remember, we aren’t prohibiting social media, we are training our children how to live in a world that is full of darkness and temptation. (Also, our children, still today, have access to our phones.)
Create boundaries with social media in the home. When our children were younger they couldn’t take their phones into their room. We wouldn’t let them bring it in the car. We wouldn’t let them bring it to the table. As they get older, as they display responsibility, we allow them additional freedoms but they still can’t bring it to the table for a meal and we ask them to stay off their phones when they are in the car. Again, we give this same challenge to ourselves, and it’s hard.
Have a plan for consequences. No matter what plan you come up with there is going to be failure, therefore, taking the phone can’t be the consequence every time. Get creative. It can be running laps, doing chores, paying money, creating a do-over; but they need to see you are trying to help them learn hard lessons in life and either mom and dad can provide a little consequence or the world is going to bring a much more painful consequence.
Watch how your children interact with social media. Watch their attitude when you ask them to get offline. Watch what they look at online. Observe their attitude before and after and use those observations to have conversations with your children to help them see how social media is influencing them. At first they will say, “Social media doesn’t influence me.” But hopefully, before they launch out of our homes, they see social media’s influence.
Social media isn’t inventing new sins. Our hearts are wicked. Sin is crouching at our door to destroy us, therefore, as parents we want to teach our children how to be on guard against sin, how to see the brokenness of our souls and how to find forgiveness and strength in Jesus.
Encourage your teenagers as much as you can. You’re an adult. You see 100 things they miss, therefore, it’s really easy to focus on those 95 things they miss and overlook the 5 things they are doing really well. If they don’t believe that you are for them and are trying to help them, they really aren’t going to care what you have to say about social media.
Life isn’t just about having fun. This is a harder lesson to teach then you might imagine. We spend the first ten years of parenting telling and modeling to our children that their safety and security is our primary focus. Then, we spend the next 10 years helping them to see we won’t always be there to take care of them. It’s a difficult transition. Therefore, helping our teens to see there are responsibilities in life we need to take care of first and then we can have a little fun is a long process but we have to take care of the responsibilities first.

Lastly, if you are reading this article and you feel like it’s too late for your child! Don’t worry. It’s never too late to have this conversation with your children. Perhaps there are some habits and patterns that can be coarse corrected? Perhaps there are some conversations that need to take place?

But it’s never too late to grow in our faith in Jesus. It’s never too late to turn from darkness and turn toward the light made available in Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. It’s never too late to have a conversation with our children, so take heart, the Lord is working. Turn to Jesus and ask for His help!

Resources:

Holy Spirit. Plead for wisdom.
American Girls Social Media and the Lives of Teenagers.
Feeding the Mouth that Bites You by Kenneth Wilgus (History of teenagers in chapter 2 is helpful.)
A Parent’s Guide to Understanding Social Media by Mark Oestereicher (Chapters 4-5 are good for parents and teens to read together. Chapter 6 is good for parents.)
Screen Smart Parenting (Chapter 15 on ADHD, anxiety and how social media influences us. Chapter 16 on agreements with social media and specific ages.)
Your Identity in a Selfie World by Kristen Hatton: A short book that provides great gospel conversations over areas like comparison, body image, eating disorders, materialism, etc. (Great to read through and discuss with your teenager.)
How Children Succeed by Paul Tough
CBS: Why Can’t We Put Down Our Smartphones