Parenting in the New World

I've said before that I think my generation has a unique place in history. We entered adolescence using typewriters, and before our prefrontal cortexes were fully developed, we could send an email across the world. For free! The Millennials might think they're special in this regard, too, but they never had to max out the telephone cord down the hall and into the laundry room so they could have a private conversation. (People actually used to have phone conversations. But the long-distance ones had to wait until after 10 p.m.) Millennials didn't go from vinyl to 8-track to cassettes to CDs over the course of their childhoods. They don't remember tumbling around the back of a station wagon before anyone had heard of child restraints. These are privileged memories held by Gen Xers, the generation that straddled antiquity and the media age.

We're also the first generation to parent teenagers in the media age. And we are blindly feeling our way through it, day by day. Because it changes every day. The junior high world my 7th grader functions in today is vastly different than the one her brother inhabited (at the same school) seven years ago. 

We're the first generation to have online school as an option for our high schoolers. We're the first to raise teenagers at a time when everything from free SAT prep to graphic sex is just a click away all the time. To raise kids who don't need adults to teach them things, because surely everything they need to know can just be googled. To parent in the shadow of social media influencers who make more than I'll ever make in my life by putting on makeup or playing video games in their bedrooms. To parent in a world in which 10-year-olds carry something in their pockets that cost more than my first car and goad other 10-year-olds to just kill themselves already. A world in which we have to decide if we're going to track our kids 24/7 (and let them track us), and then decide what to do when a 19-year-old living two time zones away doesn't make it back to the dorm when we think they should. There are no handbooks for living in this world. We can't learn from the people who have gone before us. There are plenty of opinions, but very few absolutes. Most of us are trying to figure it out day by day, knowing tomorrow it will change.

My kids' school is feeling its way through the media age. Our seven campuses, K-12, are preparing to completely remove cell phones and other digital devices for the duration of the school day (or at least attempt to). It might require more staff. It might chase students, parents, and staff away. It might be impossible to enforce. But they're going to try it, and I fully support their efforts. My kids are less enthusiastic.

We are feeling our way through it in our own house. We use cheap, off-brand phones. We don't track anything--our fitness, our sleep, our Amazon packages, or our kids. We've been as slow as we could realistically be in handing out cell phones, but it's gotten earlier with each kid. The oldest got his first phone at 16, the next at 15, the next at 14, and it will be challenging to make it to 14 with our youngest, who's currently 12 and sharing my phone. (Yes, that's as fun as it sounds. I love the 6 a.m. texts asking me how I'm planning to wear my hair that day.) All of us have stayed off of social media. All of us are significantly less in the know than our friends. Our younger girls get teased, mostly in fun, about it. Their friends probably think their parents are either 95 or Amish. So far, it seems like it's been a good call, but I question myself all the time.

You know those families that don't do sugar, and then their kids go to college and OD on it? Will our kids be like that? Are they not learning essential social media skills that would serve them well later in life? Should we follow the advice of multiple experts and be walking through it carefully with them while they're still under our roof? Are we just hiding our heads in the sand? Are we making our family archaic and completely out of touch?

I honestly don't know. I recently checked in with all my girls, a senior, a sophomore, and a 7th grader, to see where they're at with all of it. My youngest thinks it's dumb when everyone pulls out their phones at a birthday party, but she wishes she could choose for herself to be the one not pulling out her phone instead of having that decision made by us. That seems like a pretty fair and mature assessment to me. My older girls who both have phones but no social media said they feel out of it, but they think it's worth it. One said, "Life is stressful as it is. I can't imagine adding that." The other said she has plenty to make her feel insecure and self-conscious, and she doesn't need social media helping her out. They don't need to read studies about the rise in anxiety among teenage girls. They see it all around them. And they feel like staying out of the social media scene has saved them a lot of envious moments and sleepless nights. But it's not fun feeling like you're on the outside, even when you don't really want to be on the inside. At this point, neither of them thinks they'll jump in when they're out on their own, but they say they'll just have to wait and see.

Are we making the right decisions? I don't know. But I see my kids on their phones a lot, and I wonder what it would be like if they had TikTok and Snapchat and Instagram. I see how tricky it is to juggle endless homework, yelling coaches, needy friends, college searches, jobs, feeling left out, body image, insecurity, and honoring God without social media, and I think of how much more complicated it could be with it. I read articles and watch shows (Hulu's Jawline and the fictional movie Eighth Grade were so eye-opening) that make my heart break for today's teenagers. I don't want naive kids, but I want kids whose identity comes from God, not from how their phones make them feel. So this is our answer today. And to those parents who have thought through all of this as long and hard as I have and made totally different choices, I say, "We're all in this together. There's no room for judgment here."

The one thing that unites all parents of all generations is our need for wisdom. I cling to James 1:5, "If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you."