7 Days to Dethrone Social Media in Your Children’s LivesSample

Rethink Authority

People spend, on average, over two hours a day using social media. When social media is used to rightly expose the abuses of people in authority through a medium that receives that much time and attention, it will lead many Christians to distrust the authority of the people who are responsible to shepherd them in their local churches or even their homes. Perhaps you feel like social media is leading your children to not trust you. What might you be able to do about that?

1) Assume your kids don’t trust you.

I don’t mean to advise you to be paranoid. This is not a call to defensiveness or fear or cynicism. What I mean to say is that you should be ready to build trust with your kids rather than assume they trust you. Look, I was a “good kid” when I was a teenager. I got straight-As. I didn’t get in trouble. I had a job and was good at it. But even I struggled to trust my parents at times. I rebelled against them even as I maintained my appearance of being a “good kid” outside the home. Your kids probably spend more time building community with people on the internet than they do talking to you. So you need to work hard to lead them to trust you, because people online may be leading them to distrust you.

2) Lead with convictional kindness.

We must not be afraid to be nice to our kids. It isn’t that hard but sometimes it can feel excruciating, especially when our kids are being difficult! If we hope to build trust with our kids, we would be wise to let our parenting be colored more by our kindness and our grace, all the while being fueled by our conviction in the truth of the gospel and its implications for our lives. Likewise, we must always be watching our own conduct. Our kids are going to have trouble trusting us if they see and hear us parenting them to do one thing and then see us acting differently. It will be hard for our kids to trust us if, for instance, we tell them to respect people and then we scream at a referee at a basketball game.