Moral development in the age of social media

I’ve taught English at a public high school for the last sixteen years. When my job comes up in conversation, people often want to know what books I teach.  In the past, the reasons were generally nostalgic: “I hope they’re still teaching Hawthorne” or “They better not still be reading A Catcher in the Rye!” Recently, though, the question of what public schools are teaching is asked with more earnestness—and much more anxiety.  

The fear, I think, is that the great progressive political machine driving American education is handpicking books and crafting lesson plans meant to undermine traditional and Christian worldviews. Even if hyperbolic, these aren’t automatically outrageous beliefs. The topic of public-school curriculum is indeed an important one in America, one worthy of discussion, debate, and civic action. 

My frustration with these conversations, though, is rooted in what I take to be a complete misunderstanding of the battleground for the moral development of today’s teenagers. Alas, students do not develop their moral beliefs or intuitions in the high school classroom. They do not through the novels they read, in or out of the class. Rather, teenagers come to their opinions on issues of morality almost entirely through their inundation in social media.  

If parents are concerned about their children’s moral development, they should be less concerned with public-school curriculum and more concerned with the appropriate age children should get phones, basic phones and then smartphones. Parents should be less eager to attend a board meeting to ban a book that potentially promotes themes of transgenderism than to discuss with fellow Christians about when, if ever, children should get social media accounts. The parent who is writing concerned letters to the local newspaper about the “trash” public schools are teaching but who unreflectively hands their 12-year-old a smartphone is fighting the wrong battle. That 12-year-old, inundated as they will be with social media over the next 5 years, most likely will have intense (even if inconsistent) positions on transgenderism by the time they are 17 years old and in my senior English class, and neither I nor their parents will be able to sway them.  

First, let me address two things quickly.  Early education, especially elementary, is an entirely different ballgame. What a 1st grade teacher is mandated to teach to the twenty bright-eyed students is of more immediate concern than the senior year English curriculum.  Second, teachers can absolutely influence students. While teenagers don’t do well with direct attacks on their beliefs, it is true that high school students are remarkably vulnerable, and much of their outward confidence and bravado betray a concern over their identity and place in the world. I just don’t think the influence works quite the way many concerned parents think it works.  

The central battleground for the formation of our youth lies in social media and smartphones. High school students spend on average about 5 hours a day on social media, and this is almost definitely an underestimate, potentially grossly so. In some recent studies, up to 50% of contemporary teenagers said they are on their phones “almost constantly,” regardless of whether they’re in a classroom, at work, at dinner, or hanging with their friends. For most youth, this exorbitant amount of time on the screen and in the world of influencers and social competition works directly against their moral formation.  

Photo by Ioann-Mark Kuznietsov on Unsplash

I’m not arguing that there’s a nefarious group out there controlling social media, ensuring it promotes anti-Christian ethics. I have little expertise to speak on that topic. I’m simply pointing out that the average youth who spends hours upon hours on social media between the ages 11 and 17 will be inundated by an ethic that normalizes positions on sex and sexual identity that is contrary to the Christian faith. That such a youth maintains any serious religious identity at all after such a media inundation is amazing itself ─ but too often, even the religious kids overtly disagree with Christianity on the topic of sex and sexual identity.  

It’s true that a youth culture has existed for more than half a century; it seems to have always been powerful and in contention with tradition. My argument, though, is that the youth culture in the age of social media is more consuming in both time (remember the kids “almost always” on the phones) and ideological uniformity. Part of the reason for this is that social media has the ability to “punish” those with contrary positions. As a result, the worldview spun by the influencers of YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok is scarily consistent. Similar to the way the creation and explosion of selfies and selfie-videos led to a tremendous pressure to look alike physically, the same thing has happened on ideological issues. In particular, social media allows for only for progressive positions on issues of sexuality.  

I’ll give one example. While my student population is made up of kids across the religious spectrum—from atheists to those questioning to sincere believers, and everywhere in between—I don’t think I’ve encountered a student in the last two or three years that seriously questioned the sacredness of gay marriage and the obvious good of transgenderism. People love to debate transgender athletics, but no student would ever ever question that a man who feels like a woman, or just wants to be a woman, is in fact a woman. Some of these students are serious Christians who take their religious obligations sincerely. They're willing to speak about it in the classroom. I’ve heard a few speak out against abortion (although this too is becoming less frequent). However, never would a pro-life student speak against gay marriage or trangenderism─and not because they’re not bold, because they are, but because the inherent good of gay marriage and transgenderism is unquestioned.  

To fellow Christian parents of adolescents, if you want to spend time engaging in cultural battles about the public school’s curriculum, all the power to you. We absolutely need to be engaged in such battles. But if you’re not more interested in how to protect your child against the mind-numbing and pernicious ethics that are normalized by social media, you’re fighting the wrong battle.  

You might question my focus and argue that social media isn’t as much to blame as I’m making it out to be. I’m not all that concerned with proving that social media is the central conduit of our youth’s moral formation, partly because others have done so, but mainly because it’s obvious to me, having been in the classroom for the past sixteen years. Students’ access to and opinions on all news and ideas, whether it be about music, film, morality, or politics, comes directly from social media. It is the invisible lens through which everything else is seen or read. 

The influence on your child’s moral formation, while incredibly important, is by no means the only reason you should be extremely deliberate about when you hand your child a smartphone and/or social media.  Here are a few other important considerations. For boys in particular (but not exclusively), smartphone usage is often synonymous with exposure to and potential addiction to pornography. We should be concerned about the ease and speed with which pornographic material is accessible to anyone with a smartphone. Pornography via smartphones normalizes both pornography itself as well as the content of the pornographic material. Video game addiction is another enormously consequential effect of the smartphone age, and much will be written about this in the next decade. Like pornography, the demographic most hurt by this is boys.  

For girls in particular, the terrible consequences of social media on self-image and sense of identity should be a huge concern for parents. Recently there’s been an explosion of studies showing a causal link (not just a correlation) between social media usage and depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and suicide for preteen and teenage girls. Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation (2024) exhaustively lays out evidence for exactly this. It’s a book I wish all parents would read. I don’t agree with everything in it, but it is laudable for its thoroughness in research and because it speaks to the issue confidently, candidly, and perhaps most importantly, specifically─for example, Haidt addresses the age at which you should give your child a smartphone.

Of course, there are the obvious issues with the omnipresence of phones that don’t discriminate by age, top among them being a declining ability to focus and concentrate. I know of few people who haven’t found it more difficult to be present─whether to nature, a child, a book or prayer─while keeping their phone on them constantly. But even here, the damage affects the young more powerfully, by attacking the power to concentrate at the exact time that a young person’s brain is developing just this ability. A student of mine, extremely talented and entirely driven, once told me she hadn’t finished a full-length movie in a single sitting in over a year, despite being a lover of film.  She said that, despite the best of intentions, the impulse to check her phone eventually becomes too strong. Perhaps most ominously was her final comment, that she couldn’t tell you exactly when she drifted from film to phone—and she couldn’t tell you a single thing she watched on TikTok while ignoring the final hour of the film. 

We should be engaging with family and friends about this topic, doing our best to not pass judgment. Ask people if they’re aware of the terrible psychological damage of Instagram and Tik Tok on girls’ self-image and happiness, and of the multiplicity of mental illnesses it produces. Ask them if they’ve read the article “I Had a Helicopter Mom. I Found Pornhub Anyway” by 16 year-old Isabel Hogben (The Free Press).  sk them if they’ve thought about the effects of hours and hours of video games will have on children’s development, intellectual or human. If they hold traditional beliefs on issues of morality, ask them how those beliefs stand a chance when they’re being combatted 24/7 by social media influencers. 

If and when discussing these topics with those who share your concern, steer the conversation away from the depressing and fatalistic, e.g., “It’s awful, right, but what can you do?” Instead, talk positively and talk specifically. We need to discuss at what ages and to what end we give our kids technology, particularly smartphones & social media, although video gaming systems should be on our radar too. Rather than succumb to technological fatalism which tells us that we must give smartphones to our 5th graders, let’s brainstorm alternatives age-ranges. Let’s not leave our guidelines in the hands of Silicon Valley, which has its very good (financial) reasons for lowering and then lowering again the age at which kids get phones.  

In his Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt presents straightforward guidelines: no smartphones before 13 and no social media before 16. As a general rule of thumb, I think these are decent age ranges, and even though I think there are problems with them, I would love it if parents followed them instead of being pressured to hand over an unlimited iPhone by age 10─or 9 or 8. That said, I take exception to Haidt on two counts. First, I think it naïve to think that the giving of a smartphone can coexist with not being on social media. Yes, Haidt addresses this, but here I didn’t find him convincing. In my opinion, you can’t give a regular smartphone without accepting that you’re also giving full access to the internet, including social media.  

And this leads to my second difference of opinion. I personally don’t think a minor—anyone under 18—has the maturity and development to enter into the fray of unlimited internet. I see of no reason at all that a high schooler benefits in any real way from, say, social media. Of course, the common response to this line of thinking is, “Are you prepared for your kid to be the only kid without Instagram or Snapchat? Are you prepared for them to never know what’s going on?” I don’t take these arguments lightly. I’m lucky in that my kids go to a school in which phones are handed in at the beginning of the day, so there’s no distinction between a smartphone user and not. I’m additionally blessed that a lot of my children’s friends’ families think like my wife and me, so my phone-less kids aren’t the odd ones out. I have a brother in a different situation, and he’s given his high school student a “faux” smartphone. It looks “normal,” and it allows him to text and call his friends (and not be the odd ball out), but it allows no social media apps or anything like it.  

My point here is that, if you’re serious enough on the topic─and I think everyone should be─there are practical ways of raising kids with these values. That said, I think that communities of people are extremely important. A kid without a phone can be friends with people with phones, but it’s easier if the kid has a group of friends also without phones.  

I’d like to broaden my focus on social media, beyond teenagers. I’ve yet to be convinced that social media has any lasting, important positive benefit to anyone, not at least a benefit that couldn’t be better found in a different medium. Furthermore, I think that social media of any consistent (and especially heavy) use works directly against important keys to living a good life: living in the present, being attentive to others, especially our children, and avoiding unnecessary anxiety and comparison. Most importantly, I think phone usage in general and social media in particular tends to work directly against a fostering of inner silence that is reception to God’s voice. 

Do I believe this strongly? Absolutely. Am I sure I’m correct? Hardly. But I think it essential to reflect on these topics, make concrete decisions, and then live by them. I’m open to alternative ideas, and I’m sure to read up on the newest research. But at the end of the day, I must make the decision that I feel God is encouraging me or challenging me to, as does everyone else. We must all be alert to the changing world of technology, its promises and dangers, for us and for our children. If you feel led to engage with your local board of education about their curriculum, go for it, but not before making faithful, deliberate choices about your children’s technologies.  

I’ll end by returning to the English classroom. I love literature for countless reasons, chief among them being that I (in the words of Tobias Wolff) “recognize the world in a different way because of” the books I’ve read ─ I’ve been “opened up, made more alert, and called to a greater truthfulness in my own accounting of things, not just in my writing, in my life as well” (Paris Review). In the context of this essay, the physical and intellectual experience of reading literature can act as an antidote to the inherent weaknesses and poor effects of phones and social media. For starters, reading long-form requires a slowing down, a selecting of a time apart from the noise of the world, and consistent attention to the nonvisual; even if a text describes an image, it is the reader that produces it in her own mind. As I suggest to my students, I try incredibly hard to read in larger chunks of time (between 30 minutes and 2 hours) without any distraction ─ and to schedule these a few times a week. When reading, the phone can’t be in my pocket or on silent ─ it must be off my person and stored away.

Of course, the better the book you’re giving yourself and your time over to, the more worthwhile the experience ─ and the more rewarding. Engaging with literature, like with art in general, offers us an opportunity to discuss the big questions of life ─ the perennial and the topical ─ in a way that avoids the simplicity and shallowness of ideological bickering in the age of the internet. A good story, even if it contains elements of didacticism, is never as simple as “proving a point,” especially not in any right- or left-wing sense of the phrase. This is Wolff again, on the power of Chekhov, as well as good literature in general: “Chekhov is not out to prove the kinds of things that can be stated in paraphrase, if I can put it that way. The truths of his stories are truths that can only be realized in a story, they can’t be abstracted from the story” (Paris Review). Encouraging students to engage with Toni Morrison’s novels Beloved or Song of Solomon will indeed get us talking about America and race, but in a way lightyears beyond political discourse in the world of social media.  The existential “truth” of Morrison’s storytelling helps students see just how simple and shallow contemporary discourse usually is. 

I can say the same about many other authors I teach: Tobias Wolff himself, along with Flannery O’Connor, Joseph Conrad, Shakespeare, and countless others. Even much of the mediocre literature I teach allows for a discussion that exceeds in complexity the angry sound bytes and click-bait titles of the modern internet. So yes, I care deeply about my school’s English curriculum because I understand the value of and potential effect of sitting for long periods at the feet of storytelling masters ─ and then fostering a conversation about these books in the classroom. Even if I’m fully aware that the moral senses of the teenagers in my classroom aren’t being formed by the ideas of Faulkner, Twain, or Melville, there remains tremendous value in assigning and discussing great works of literature.