Protecting Kids & Teens in the Age of AI Companions, Screens & Social Media

Taking a walk through the teen culture can cause deep concern, but with the right attitude, it doesn’t have to. It does take more energy and time to help this generation of adolescents. Teens are growing up in an amoral (and, at times, immoral) culture. This is somewhat of a new phenomenon. In generations past, the biblical worldview was the accepted standard. Not everyone followed it, but if they deviated from it, they recognized they had done something wrong. Today, parents can’t give up and they can’t back down. You can make a difference when you are proactive. Set parental standards. When it comes to culture, help your teen set standards and develop a sound biblical grid in which to measure morals and values. You can’t make everything a fight, but teens who become healthy, responsible adults often say that they understood their parents’ expectations. They received clearly expressed expectations about behavior, and they knew the consequences ahead of time. Parents can promote restraint and teach their kids a biblical worldview, but it will take intentionality. Teens aren’t always going to agree with everything a parent says, but they must know your boundaries and your standards, even if they rebel. Most kids really do want to please their parents, despite not always acting like it. Teach your kids to discern. It is better to teach your teen how to discern culture’s impact than to keep her in a protective bubble. When kids are younger, parents must truly protect their children from unhealthy cultural influences, but as they become teenagers, your parenting style has to change from protection to what looks more like a coaching relationship. If you keep your kids in a bubble, that bubble will burst when they are outside the four walls of your home and have more freedom. My kids would say that Cathy and I were quite conservative when it came to media. We had plenty of discussions where they thought we might have stepped out of the 1800s. However, we let them see certain movies and TV shows as long as we went along and could dialogue afterward about the content. You are the parent, which makes you the leader. Good leaders are good listeners, and listening is the language of love. Listening to your kids’ opinions honors them, even if at the end you agree to disagree. You may have to say words like, “When I was your age I would have felt the same way, but nevertheless in our home we will do it this way.” Teaching our kids discernment keeps the end goal in mind.

Social media. The culture changes so quickly. Does anyone still remember Myspace? There was a time when Facebook was the social media of choice for teens, but then their parents started using it, so they rapidly migrated to Instagram. Now Snapchat has become the most popular social media for teenagers. What’s next? Wait until next year to find out. Social media meets the adolescent’s need for unstructured socialization with peers. So part of the job for every parent is to help teach their teen to discern just how social media affects our lives. Today, about eight in ten teenagers ages thirteen to seventeen use social media.[^6] Social media scratches the adolescent’s itch for social connection with their peers. They enjoy connecting and interacting with friends, making new friends, and sharing their thoughts and feelings through their social media posts. Social media weaves its way through and intersects with all other media types. So your teen is interacting with others using a combination of visual, audio, and textual media in their posts. Selfies are huge in social media today largely because they are a perfect fit for teenagers in the throes of adolescent development, particularly as they work through the issues of identity, self-image, and self-esteem. Each selfie posted gives a kid the opportunity to test-drive her sense of identity and receive almost immediate feedback through social media. This feedback presents a doubleedged sword, with positive and negative outcomes. As kids view feedback from selfies, they refine their awareness of identity, popularity, and fame, for better or worse. Adolescent experts and parents alike suggest that ephemeral apps (apps where the posts are deleted after a period of time) such as Snapchat are potentially dangerous for teenagers—for all of the right reasons: kids can use them to send a sext, or other inappropriate pictures or video, with a false sense of security that no one but the recipient will ever see the images. Ephemeral apps are becoming the biggest form of bullying with teens. But tech-savvy kids can take a screenshot before the image disappears and then redistribute it, where it might reside in cyberspace forever. One final thought about social media: as teens use it as a means to develop social skills, remember that because adolescence is a season of experimentation, they are likely to experiment. The online environment emboldens kids to communicate in ways they would not when in face-to-face conversation, or to engage in behaviors they typically would not. Highly sexualized comments, criticisms, rants, bullying, sexting, and creating profiles with an alternative identity, may all fall under the umbrella of social media experimentation. Again, parents cannot keep their heads in the sand with media; it’s just too easy for your kids to stray.

If you have been involved in viewing pornography—even if you don’t think you’re addicted—please, by all means, pursue some help and accountability. Proverbs says, “Guard your heart above all else, for it determines the course of your life,”[^4] and this could not be more applicable than with protecting your marriage. Pornography is a very big deal, and don’t fall for the lie that it’s harmless! It is a destructive force that doesn’t just go away on its own; you have to send it away by getting some help and becoming accountable. Be honest. Bring it into the light by telling someone who you trust, who feels safe, who won’t judge you, and who will be willing to walk through this with you. The issue will only grow more destructive in darkness. Maybe your problem isn’t that you have stored sexual images in your mental hard drive, but that you have had past sexual relationships. Those experiences carry with them their own set of tapes, and they are not easily erased from your memory. Before marriage is the time to be honest, transparent, and straightforward about your past relationships. Spare the nitty-gritty details, but make sure there are no surprises on the other side of the wedding. If you can’t be honest now, we’re afraid you won’t be honest in the future. We are big fans of grace and forgiveness and fresh starts, but we also know the damage that happens when you bring unresolved issues into a marriage. When it comes to protecting your marriage, we also believe strongly in setting healthy boundaries with the opposite sex. One of my (Doug) good friends was a pastor serving in a church. He was too loose with boundaries regarding the opposite sex and found himself having lunches and coffee with a woman who was not his wife. It started out innocently, but as time passed their feelings evolved. My friend began sharing intimate secrets with her, he started dressing more for her than for his wife, and he began to fantasize about being with this other woman sexually. Finally, he went exactly where his mind had already gone. He crossed the line physically, and that was the beginning of the end. Today he is divorced, and unfortunately it wasn’t just his marriage that was shattered. His careless actions took down two marriages with a total of seven kids who lost their mom or dad over this whole situation. Years after the divorce my friend confessed that if he would have thought more deeply about the purity code, established better boundaries, and invited accountability into his struggles, the affair would never have happened. At all costs, discuss what boundaries you will place around your marriage. Talk about them and then commit to them. Why? Because everyone is capable of anything—even you. You are just a few bad decisions away from messing everything up and destroying a lot of lives. Please don’t take this lightly.