Should Christian parents be concerned about their children being on Instagram?

We have been talking about the spiritual practice of fasting in our church recently. Our focus has been looking at the things in our daily lives that take up time and distract us from things that do us good and connect us to Jesus. Some members of our group are fasting food for a day. I felt challenged to fast social media for a while. I have deleted the Instagram and Facebook apps off my phone with the intention to have less screen time and less attention sucked out of my life!

I feel quite a bit of shame around my social media usage, actually. I don’t post a lot: the odd holiday snap; the odd article repost. However, my random scrollings that lead me down rabbit holes or randomness are the problem. I am not watching anything immoral or nasty, but my shame comes from the banality of time spent. I can speed 30 minutes at a time watching videos of babies and cats. At the end of those 30 minutes, I look up from my phone and feel real guilt that I have wasted time. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with videos of babies and cats, it’s just the sheer mindlessness of scrolling that’s the issue. I don’t actively choose to spend my time scrolling, but I allow it to happen to me; I don’t actively stop it. I am a 40 year old woman. I am supposed to have some self control!

This social media fast has allowed me to see the effect that Instagram and Facebook have on my life. It has caused me to look, in a more balanced way, at the hold it has on me, and because I am a parent to teens, how it affects society as a whole. Are we richer because we are seemingly “more connected”?

’Social media terrifies me!’

As a parent, social media terrifies me! If I, an experienced, relatively self-aware woman of 40 can get sucked into the vortex of empty scrolling, what would it do to my teen? Is social media an inevitable part of growing up, a useful, essential tool, or is it just an attention drain that saps the self confidence out of our children? I decided to find out! (For more on social media, go here).

I decided to look at just one platform to base my research on. I chose Instagram because that is my weakness and also because it is listed as one of the most dangerous apps for children, according to Psychology Today.

Instagram is a social media platform that focuses around photos and live videos created to inspire creativity through visual storytelling. First launched in 2010, it took the world by storm, quickly becoming the most popular form of social media. It has over 1 billion monthly users ranging from “celebrity influencers” to brands and just your average user. In fact, over 500 million users post daily. And 52% of teens say they feel the pressure to have an Instagram presence.