Just wait

Unpopular opinion: most high schoolers aren’t either.

{This is not our typical house or family content, but I’m taking a break from that today to share something that has been on my heart and mind for months.}

If there’s one thing I could do differently when my girls were younger, it would be to wait longer on social media. 

I mean, there are a lot of things I would do differently if I had the gift of knowing then what I know now, but that’s one that pings around my brain often these days. 

My plans and intentions were good. I would monitor their exposure. We would talk about what they were seeing or hearing. They wouldn’t be overly sheltered, but instead would be prepared to manage their digital lives by the time they left our home. 

Except that’s not how teenage brains work on digital content. The combined immaturity of the teenage brain and the heroin-like effect of social media leads to an addiction and dependency that no parent would willingly allow their child to have in any other circumstance. None of us say, “I’m going to let my 13 year old start using cocaine here at home. That way I can monitor him and teach him how to use it responsibly.” No. We teach our children to stay away from what is toxic and harmful for them and we definitely don’t set it on a sleek, beautiful tray and let them take it to their room or keep it in their pocket 24/7. 

I haven’t always disliked social media. I used to enjoy it. I still use it, but more out of habit (see?) and somewhat out of obligation, since so much of the adult world happens there now. But six years of working in a school, ten years of having children on some form of social media, and fifteen years of watching the platforms evolve have convinced me that, at least for children, the bad outweighs any good that could come from it. And this is without even talking about the escalating mental health crisis our teens are experiencing and the connections science is proving there. 

If I had it to do over again, I would wait until my children were 16, at least, maybe 17. But around their junior year of high school we would begin the slow addition of social media, after years of talking to her, sharing my own experiences, and teaching her how to monitor what goes into her heart and mind and how much those things matter. 

Here’s the deal - we can’t as adults keep up with the constant changes in social media platforms or trends. And we definitely can’t continually monitor what rabbit hole the algorithms lead our children down. Our increasingly digital world will continue to outpace even the most tech-savvy adults. And honestly, the most tech-savvy ones seem to hate social media the most. 

“But won’t our kids just move away and not know how to manage their digital world or just download all the apps and get addicted then?” Perhaps. But ideally I will have given them the tools to know how to manage themselves, just like I will ideally give them the tools to know how to manage their time to wake up for an 8 am class or manage their money so they can get paid on the first and still be able to buy groceries on the 25th. Even more ideally, I will have given them a taste and a desire for something better than social media has to offer; something real and personal - relationships with other people, with nature, with books, with God. But even with those tools, all kinds of things can happen in our kids’ lives once they leave our homes, and once they reach that stage I can only trust that I did the best I could and they are never out of God’s reach, but their choices then are their own. It is while they are in my house that I have the most influence and authority to prepare them for all that the world is going to throw at them once they walk out that door. 

So I guess I share this for those of you who have young ones just on the cusp of getting a phone or social media. Wait. Just wait. They’ve got a lifetime to be exposed to the dumpster fire that is the internet. Help them guard their hearts just a little bit longer.