I welcome the news that Australia is hoping to ban social media for under 16s, and am praying that our government does likewise. Twenge’s book contains plenty of research, charts and data that might provide some motivation for major societal change in this regard:

“In recent years, 40% of high school seniors (17-18yrs olds) have not read a single book in the last year that wasn’t assigned for school. Back in the early 1980s, that was true of only 15% of high school seniors.”

“11-17 years olds get an average of 237 notifications a day from their phones”

“College students who used devices for an hour before bed were 59% more likely to have symptoms of insomnia and slept 24 minutes less than those who didn’t use devices before bed.”

“In 2008, when few teens had smartphones, 45% of 8th graders (13-14yr olds) said they were often bored. By 2023, it was 61%. Devices filled with bite-size videos were supposed to mean we were never bored, but instead more teens than ever are filled with ennui.”

“Meta’s internal research found that 13% of British teen users and 6% of American teen users who had suicidal thoughts said their desire to kill themselves traced back to Instagram.”

All of which goes some way to explain the title of tech entrepreneur Jaron Lanier’s 2018 book Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now and the reason Sharon and Richard Pursey’s team are being celebrated for creating the first phone with inbuilt anti-nudity technology designed to keep children safe online.

It’s obviously true that smartphones have transformed how we live, something that Jonathan Haidt describes as ‘the Great Rewiring,’ resulting in an end to the traditional play based childhood and the advent of the phone based one. In a world like this, one where more than twenty-four thousand minutes of new user video is uploaded to YouTube every minute of every day, how can the church ensure we’re doing what we can to disciple our young people?

Here’s two things every parent, pastor and youth worker needs to know, followed by one opportunity not to be missed:

1) Boys and Girls Are Different

Generally speaking phones and social media are affecting boys and girls differently. Already by 2015 we were seeing evidence of the impact that social media was having on girls as distinct from boys. In a study from that year one in five teenage girls said they had experienced a major depressive episode in the last year.

Rates of clinical-depression among girls recently peaked at 29% compared to 11% among boys. Among children who spend more than five hours a day on social media, 38% of girls compared to 14% of boys suffer from depression as a result. The reasons for this are well documented as well but stem in large part from algorithms and beauty filters built into the apps young girls are using. Jonathan Haidt believes this is exactly what we would expect to find given the particular social dynamics among girls and the way social media amplifies them. In The Coddling of the America Mind he writes:

If we were to put a handgun in the hand of every testosterone filled teenage boy we’d inevitably see a rise in the amount of homicides. If we were to put a device in the hands of our girls that created social comparison and anxiety we’d likely see a rise in the amount of suicides and mental health disorders.

Boys, by comparison are spending more time playing video games and getting stuck in the quagmire of porn addiction. According to author John Gray, the reason for this is because a child’s brain on a video game, or a male brain looking at nude images of women, reacts almost identically to a brain on class A drugs. We also know that the presence of testosterone in boys slows down brain development whereas oestrogen in girls speeds it up. In the book Brain Rules, molecular biologist John Medina shares a particularly memorable contrast about the sexes from watching girls and boys at play.

Two girls are together, one throws a ball into the air and catches it, the other says ‘me too’ and then does the same thing. Two boys are together and do the same thing but the second boy rather than saying ‘me too’ instead says ‘I can throw it higher.’

Consequently, healthy competition and challenges in discipling boys is perhaps more important to think about than when discipling girls.

2) Parents Matter

To disciple young people well we need to do more to engage and equip parents for the task.

In her book How the West Really Lost God, sociologist Mary Eberstadt studies trends in religiosity across time and finds a correlation between that and the strength of the family. When the traditional family is weak (or treated as an oppressive institution as has been the case in recent times) church attendance is low but, she says, revival of religion and renewal of the domestic family have often gone hand in hand. Eberstadt calls ‘Christianity’ and ‘the family’ twin columns of a society’s DNA helix that rise and fall together. When one is strong (church attendance say) the other is also strong (committed marriages and strong families), but when one is weak the other is weak also.

Generally churches know this, which is why we run baby and toddler groups. But it’s also important to consider when thinking about how we can disciple young people. The first chapter in Twenge’s latest book is for parents: You’re in Charge. Twenge argues for the importance of what she calls ‘authoritative’ parenting as opposed to ‘helicopter’ parenting (hovering over kids), ‘snowplow’ parenting (removing all of the obstacles in their way), ‘gentle’ parenting (never saying no), or ‘lighthouse’ parenting (being a source for insight but not interfering too much).

Clinical psychologist and parenting expert Becky Kennedy calls authoritative parenting “Sturdy Leadership”— it’s a combination of validating feelings but also holding boundaries. She suggests parents should respond to kids pushing back on rules with something like this: “One of my main jobs is to make decisions that I think are good for you, even when you’re upset with me. This is one of those times. I get that you’re upset, I really do.” Play the long game. “Your job is not to make your kids happy at every moment. It’s to raise competent adults who will be happy in the long term. Your most important job as a parent is giving your children experiences that help them grow.”

Building on what we said above about rates of brain development, author Scott Galloway, who has two teenage sons, says that since the brain’s prefrontal cortex (the part in charge of self-control and decision-making) doesn’t fully develop until the mid 20s, he says: “my job as their dad is to be their prefrontal cortex until it shows up.” That’s a good way of thinking about why parents must not disengage from their children’s tech use.

In 2014 Sociologist Christian Smith conducted more than 230 in-depth interviews, and studied data from three nationally representative surveys leading to one significant headline and a number of other important secondary findings.

The headline was: the single, most powerful causal influence on the religious lives of American teenagers and young adults is the religious lives of their parents. Not their peers, not the media, not their youth group leaders or clergy, not their religious schoolteachers, not Sunday School, not mission trips or service projects or summer camp… but parents.

Church leadership teams who want to disciple young people, need to be trying to equip their parents to live out their faith more in the home. Deuteronomy 6:7 says this: “you shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise.” We must be aware, in the words of Tony Reinke, that “in a world dominated by the image instead of the word, interior life gives way to exterior show. Substance gives way to simulation.” Pastors need to help parents and youth leaders work on their interior life so that we might push back against the dominant spirit of our age, not smartphones but performative culture.

The Opportunity

So those are two things we must be aware of. If you’re concerned about this and wanting to think more about what we can do, consider this.

On Saturday 7th February 2026, Newday presents Youth Culture, a conference aimed at equipping parents, professionals, pastors and youth leaders to engage with the biggest issues facing a generation. We’ll be praying for change, sharing ideas and workshopping together about how the church might disciple a generation. For more information and to sign up, click here.