Is it Sinful to Give Your Child Social Media?

Maybe it's time to ask different, deeper questions about "readiness."

“The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Right away, rebuttals are likely forming in the minds of people reading this post. But hang with me. I’m like many of you–bumbling through the digital age with my four children. Some days I’m Crying Jordan because it all seems so overwhelming. Other days my kids listen without argument and are enthralled by nature instead of YouTube. Those are my Chuck Norris days. Then, my amazing son Grant with Down syndrome somehow Rick Rolls me by sneaking the Smart TV remote from my desk. 

But I feel compelled to ask this big question about our duty as parents. “Is it sinful to give my child social media¹?” It has been pegged in my brain for weeks as I prepare for another season speaking to parents, students, principals, and legislators about creating safer digital spaces. We don’t speak exclusively in Christian schools and churches. And we don’t have an exclusively Christian following. I’ve been blessed with friends who are Jewish, Muslim, Atheist, and Agnostic who join us in our deep desire to see childhood protected from online harm. 

But if “sinful” doesn’t resonate and you’d like to keep reading, maybe insert “irresponsible,” “malevolent,” or “harmful.”

It might be useful to ensure we’re also all on the same page by giving a simple definition of what I mean by “sin.” The word translated as “sin” in our English Bibles conveys the imagery of “missing the mark.” In other words, there’s a Spiritual target with a sweet spot–maybe a bullseye that represents God’s will–and we missed it. We could do better. Jesus summarizes every law into a few simple statements: “Love the Lord your God with your whole heart, soul, and strength. And love others as yourself.” So, any act that misses these two targets likely qualifies as a sin. 

With this being the standard, have we “missed the mark” with our digital parenting decisions? Specifically, decisions related to smartphones and social media?

Imagine You’re Wandering in the Desert

Sometimes I benefit from translating a digital situation into something analog. It helps me see things more clearly.

I participated in something called Bible Study Fellowship. For a full year, we studied the Exodus account, from Moses to The Promised Land–with lots of wandering, complaining, and provision in the middle. It was common for the Hebrews to come to Moses for guidance, who approached God, and then relayed His response. 

Imagine the Hebrews stumbling upon a stone tablet in the desert that was miraculously playing videos. And another that had pictures on it. The videos on the first tablet were from TikTok. Maybe the videos were like the selection below, which were the first three videos shown to a brand new “fake” TikTok account for a 13-year-old I created last night. 

The second stone tablet included color pictures, maybe like the images shown below, which are a sample of the first accounts shown to a brand new “fake” Instagram account for a 13-year-old that curiously searched for “girl” (we blurred and provided the covers):

Imagine the Hebrews taking these tablets to Moses, asking him if they should give both tablets to their children, in their tent, and let them consume the content unsupervised, all night. “Moses, can you go to Mt. Sinai and ask God if this is what we should do with our children? Is this how we should lead them? Is this how we teach them about holiness, goodness, kindness, and compassion?”

We Need Stronger Layers and an Atheist Prophet

We have multiple layers in society that surround our children. I usually talk about five, but you might suggest others. They include:

• Companies

• Policy Makers

• Schools

• Faith Organizations

• Parents

Each has a responsibility to protect children from harm. Even the Supreme Court stated in Ginsberg v. State of N.Y., 390 U.S. 638-640 that States have a “compelling interest in protecting children from pornographic material.” Furthermore, the Court has recognized that parents are entitled to laws that support their ability to safeguard their children from harm (Id. at 639).

But all layers are failing our children. 

Companies like Snapchat, Meta, and Reddit are mostly shielded from liability because of 26 words included in the Communications Decency Act of 1996. It had noble Congressional intent, to encourage digital innovation, while preventing people from suing AOL (for example) when a troll posted something mean in a chatroom. 

However, courts have woefully misinterpreted the original intent of CDA 230 to cover exploitive content and exploitive features and conduct. This has allowed egregious harm to go unchecked. Examples include Pornhub and Xvideos generating ad revenue from child rape videos for years, Twitter avoiding responsibility for refusing to remove a video depicting child sexual abuse material of a 13-year-old, and Snapchat successfully deflecting any financial or legal responsibility for hundreds of fentanyl deaths that could have easily been prevented.

Companies aren’t the only ones shirking responsibility. The last meaningful online child protection policy passed by Congress was the 1998 Children’s Online Privacy and Protection Act. 26 years later, we are still living in the harmful wake of a law that labeled 13-year-olds (seventh graders) as “digital adults” ready for mature digital spaces. 

Schools fall short of their responsibility due to their sprint toward unsafe technology (Chromebooks, iPads), their failure to vet EdTech and AI (which often violate student privacy), and the absence of digital citizenship teaching. COVID lockdowns accelerated the problem when Chromebooks were handed out by the millions and at times, according to many of our followers, without any filters, protections, or instructions for parents. According to a 2022 Common Sense Media poll, among teens who reported that they have viewed pornography during the school day, nearly half (44%) reported having viewed pornography on school-owned devices. 

These first three layers contribute to the darkening of childhood mostly because of their actions. But the church is harming childhood for a different reason–for doing almost nothing. I’ve experienced a deafening silence from the pulpit and stage about the pervasive spiritual degradation occurring in the hearts and minds of God’s children because of the early introduction of smartphones and social media into their lives.

Ironically, author, professor, and professed atheist, Jonathan Haidt (pronounced “height”), provides one of the most complete assessments of the impacts of technology on our spiritual health in the digital age. In his best-selling book The Anxious Generation, one reviewer calls Haidt “a modern-day prophet disguised as a psychologist.” 

Haidt describes three dimensions of social space, and how we interact relationally, in the image below.

Closeness describes the quality of relationships with each other. Hierarchy describes our social status or level of perceived “respect.” For those who speak French or Spanish, think about formal versus informal references to “you.” And a third, critical line that Haidt calls the Divinity axis. 

The Divinity axis captures the idea that most cultures describe virtuous actions that bring one upward, closer to sacred places, people, or beings (God). Conversely, it describes actions that are “base, selfish, or disgusting” that “bring one downward, away from God and sometimes toward an anti-divinity such as the Devil.”

Haidt goes on to ask this pointed question:

“Does the phone-based life generally pull us upward or downward on this vertical dimension? If it is downward, then there is a cost even for those who are not anxious or depressed. If it is downward, then there is spiritual harm, for adults as well as for adolescents, even for those who think their mental health is fine.”

Chapter 8 of The Anxious Generation explores how the phone-based life impacts relationships, focus, stillness, and silence. He even compares Jesus’ instructions from the Sermon on the Mount to avoid judging others to how we often behave on social media. 

“Social media trains us to do the opposite. It encourages us to make rapid public judgments with little concern for the humanity of those we criticize, no knowledge of the context in which they acted, and no awareness that we have often done the very thing for which we are publicly shaming them.”

And finally, this gut punch:

“From a spiritual perspective, social media is a disease of the mind.”

No wonder we all feel a little grayer and more withdrawn after a long scroll session. And even with my more developed adult brain and emotions, I don’t know if “flourishing” is how I’ve ever described myself after an hour on Instagram. It leaves me wondering how our kids feel.

Maybe Jesus was Talking About Us

We’ve all seen an image of Jesus in the kids’ wing of a church where he’s in a meadow with His arms around a group of children. It serves to depict Matthew 18:1-5 (NIV):

At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Who, then, is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” He called a little child to him and placed the child among them. And he said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.”

What I’ve never seen in that kids’ wing is a second picture right next to the first one with a picture of someone drowning at the bottom of an ocean with a millstone tied around his neck (right next to the missing image of all the dead, bloated bodies floating around Noah’s Ark). But it wouldn’t be too far off because these are the next verses.

Matthew 18:6-9 (NIV): Causing to Stumble

“If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea. Woe to the world because of the things that cause people to stumble! Such things must come, but woe to the person through whom they come! If your hand or your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life maimed or crippled than to have two hands or two feet and be thrown into eternal fire. And if your eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into the fire of hell.”

Have you ever seen a millstone? I’m certain a medium-sized rock would have been sufficient for drowning, but Jesus is making sure we’re listening. DO NOT HARM MY CHILDREN. He then makes a strong case for violently removing things from our lives that cause us to stumble in our walk with God.

Saint Paul goes on to instruct us in this way:

Philippians 4:8 (NIV):

“Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.”

Our kids enjoy smartphones and social media for connection, entertainment, and exploration. And with those positives come:

• Sharp increases in anxiety, suicide ideation, and self-harm that have occurred at the same time as social media and smartphone usage. 

• Unique relational and emotional wiring in teen girls that makes them uniquely vulnerable to social media. 

• Over 10,000 terabytes of pornographic content online. That’s over 100 years of video. 

• Around 38% of teens intentionally viewing that pornography through TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, and Reddit. 

• Porn that overwhelmingly normalizes violence toward women.

• Increases in sexual dating violence likely related to damage caused by porn. 

Earlier, I wrote a fictitious account of the Hebrews discovering social media content in the desert, wondering if it was spiritually healthy for their children. Although my version is fake, there are important verses in the Exodus account where God, through Moses, does tell the Hebrews exactly how to ensure their children know what is good and holy. 

Deuteronomy 6:4-9 (NIV):

Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.

The Jewish people heard these words and took them very seriously. If you’ve visited a Jewish home, maybe you’ve noticed their ornate door hinges (mezuzah), which contain that section of the Torah. Or if you’ve visited the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, maybe you’ve seen the phylacteries worn by Jewish men on their hands and heads during weekday or Sunday morning prayers.

It’s the repetition that stands out to me in these verses. Whatever you want your children to remember, during this unique developmental stage, do it over and over. As we often say in our live talks, “Say it so often they’re rolling their eyes and finishing your sentences.” God knew that repetition works in our children. It sets a hook for Jesus when we constantly remind them of His goodness. 

Sounds like a Divine algorithm.

And it seems like Big Tech knows Scripture, too, based on what we know about their playbook. As they show all of us polarizing, emotionally engaging (and enraging), recommendation-driven content to get our minds racing. Hoping we’ll respond quickly, harshly, and frequently. Hoping we’ll hand our children devices while they sit at home, walk along the road (or travel in the family minivan), when they lie down, when they wake up. Tied on their hand as a symbol. 

This means as parents, we must ask ourselves critical questions:

• Will social media or a smartphone cause my child to stumble?

• Will social media show my child content that’s too much, too soon?

• Will social media show my child a steady stream of images and videos that are the opposite of noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent, or praiseworthy?

• Will social media or having access to a smartphone prevent my child from hearing the whispers of the Holy Spirit?

• Will social media or a smartphone degrade my child’s relationship with God?

Then, we must ask ourselves: “Is a “yes” to any of these an example of “missing the mark” in our role as parents?”

“Is it sinful to give your child social media?” I’m asking you to get alone with God and ask yourself this question. I’m hopeful that with prayer and pondering you will find your answer. Is there a right age when it’s not sinful? I’m not sure. I know it’s a lot older than what I see too many good, Jesus-loving parents doing with their kids. I stand firmly on the statement that no middle school child is a better version of themselves emotionally, relationally, or spiritually because of the presence of social media in their life.

I’m always hesitant to give an age. Because I always want us to ask deeper, second-level questions. We are responsible for making digital decisions that point our amazing children toward eternity. We are more responsible for their future wellness than their current happiness.

Age 16 for social media? Maybe. But for some, that’s still not quite right. I don’t have silver-bullet answers. But I do want us to remember that age doesn’t mean ready. #delayistheway

Why? Because big tech DOES see your child as a number. But you must see them for who they are: an image bearer of God, who has been gifted one precious childhood. 

1.  Social media includes Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat (regardless of their poorly timed “We’re not social media” marketing campaign), WhatsApp, YouTube, and anything that replaces face-to-face interaction, uses a recommendation engine, or creates social currency through likes, comments, or shares.