In 2009, about a quarter of American high school students said they had “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness.” By last year it was up to 44 percent, the highest level of teenage sadness ever recorded.
For girls, the rate rose to 57 percent. That means more than half of teenage girls feel persistently sad or hopeless. If you stood a teen from 2009 next to a teen from 2022, what would be the most noticeable difference between them? One of them would be on her phone.
In this episode of Recorded, Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra shares the stories of young women who are being shaped by social media and explores what Gen Z thinks, feels, and believes.
Transcript
The following is an uncorrected transcript generated by a transcription service. Before quoting in print, please check the corresponding audio for accuracy.
Unknown Speaker
My name is Francis Haugen. I used to work at Facebook. I joined Facebook because I think Facebook has the potential to bring out the best in us. But I’m here today because I believe Facebook’s products harm children, stoke division and weaken our democracy.
Unknown Speaker
Oh Facebook says is pausing the development of its Instagram Kids program decision
Unknown Speaker
comes after criticism from policymakers and social scientists who say that kind of project would be harmful to children’s mental health battle
Unknown Speaker
over social media. Tonight, we look at those filters on platforms like Instagram that can radically change our online appearance. are they contributing to a toxic environment for teens.
Unknown Speaker
And so another red flag I saw was with spending so much time in doors in my room with COVID, I was spending a lot of time on Instagram, I started following somehow a whole bunch of people that go to my school that I’m not even personally friends with. So I would start getting like, I don’t know if you’ve heard of the term FOMO. But it’s like fear of missing out. Because I would see other people hanging out that like go to my school. And I’m not even friends with them. But somehow I’m following them on Instagram, because we have mutual goals. And I’d be like, am I wasting my freshman year because everyone else is having a better freshman year and making more use of like, their COVID Freshman year than I am. And then another red flag I saw was I started getting like FOMO or like jealous of some friends that go to different schools having like more fun than me, their schools then mind,
Unknown Speaker
I was just realizing that the things I was doing with my day weren’t things that I wanted to do. They were things that I thought would look cool when I posted. And so even like I’m thinking about hiking, there were multiple times where I was like, Okay, this is the hike I’m going to do because it has a great view, not because I want to enjoy the grandeur in creation, but because I wanted to look really cool on my Instagram and I want to look really outdoorsy and awesome. And like I’m healthy when I was deciding where I wanted to eat based off what food would look good or like where if I wanted to go to the beach that day, not because I wanted to enjoy the beach but because I want to post about it.
Unknown Speaker
I love the attention of it. I mean, I did love connecting with my friends on it. But it also felt like this weird outlet emotionally like one of my favorite things to do is going back and looking at old Facebook posts. I’m a really big believer in not deleting embarrassing posts, especially if it’s from not like kind of early age when you’re kind of angsty. And so I have somewhere it was like almost like my diary and like its fullest form where I was expressing everything I was feeling but there were definitely some attention grabs. It’s like you know, have the name like Morgan Kendrick is like feeling sad or like, like not kind of some sort of emotional pole to like interact with other people I would say like it was like a way to like form your personality.
Sarah Zylstra
For the past year, I’ve been working on a book about social media and women. I’ve listened to some serious concerns and research some worrisome statistics, I’ve thought about how troubling social media has been in my own life. But it wasn’t until I started working on this podcast and talking to these girls that I realized something is seriously wrong here. I’m Sarah zostera. And I work for the gospel coalition. This is recorded.
Sarah Zylstra
Here’s the deal. These three young women are all really bright. They attended or still attend the University of California Berkeley, where the acceptance rate is less than 15%. They all truly love the Lord and they’ve been walking with him since they were small. Their parents are all Christians who had serious concerns about social media and set all kinds of restrictions. Having the girls wait till they were older to get their accounts only allowing the use of social media from a desktop computer and a shared living space restricting the use of a phone camera checking in on text messages and Instagram posts. Honestly, if you are making a list of all the ways to help teens handle social media, these parents checked every single box. And yet despite all that, you can hear how these girls are tangled up in social media expectations and comparisons. Their lives are being shaped and Miss shaped by how they live online. Here’s why that matters. In April of this year, the Atlantic reported that the United States is experiencing an extreme teenage mental health crisis in 2009. About a quarter of American high school students said they had persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness. By last year, it was up to 44 percent, the highest level of teenage sadness ever recorded. For girls, that rate rose to 57%. And that means that six out of 10 teenage girls feel persistently sad or hopeless. During the pandemic, more than one out of four girls seriously contemplated suicide. The articles author pointed to the most obvious culprit, if you stood a teen from 2009, next to a teen from 2022, what would be the most noticeable difference between them, one of them would be on her phone. Those are scary things to think about, especially if you are or if you know and love a teenage girl. But here’s the thing we trust in God’s sovereignty over every social media platform. And we also know that if we’re going to reach young women with the gospel, or if we’re going to disciple them into a deeper love and knowledge of Jesus, then we have to know how social media is shaping them. Honestly, we need to know how social media is shaping all of us.
Laura Wifler
It was 2005. And I remember Facebook had opened up just then to collegia addresses. So it was a huge deal. It was something that we had all sort of been anticipating. I think before that, you know, we were on email or AOL messenger or MSN Messenger. But this felt like a totally different world where you were able to add photos and you added things like where you went to school or information about yourself. Everyone was really excited about being on Facebook, and it was sort of like you weren’t official friends until you were officially Facebook friends. That was definitely a thing.
Sarah Zylstra
That’s Laura Whistler when she first logged on to Facebook as a freshman in college, only 5% of Americans were using social media, mostly on platforms like Friendster and MySpace. By the time she graduated three and a half years later, almost 80% of young people were on social media, nearly all of them on Facebook, Laura use it to check out the boys she liked.
Laura Wifler
I just remember just loving his pictures, you know, getting to see all of his photos and who he was hanging out with and who I was tagged with. I found out his major that’s what you did. You hopped on Facebook and saw who are our mutual friends, you know, is this person you want to see if they were maybe involved in like the same Christian clubs as you because then you know, if they weren’t a Christian club, you can marry them.
Sarah Zylstra
Since the iPhone wasn’t invented yet. Laura did this on a personal laptop. In her dorm room at her school, she still spent most of her free time hanging out with her friends watching movies at a theater or working in a coffee shop. She went shopping in a mall drove around for fun and played sports. She went to church and parties and football games. While she did those things, she rarely took photos and she never stared at her Nan smartphone. Laura’s Facebook friends were people she knew on her campus in real life. Back then there was no news feed. So if you wanted to know what your friends were up to, you had to click over to their page, when you ran out of people to check on, you got bored and logged off. Social media was supplementary to Laura’s life. And to everyone’s the time people spent on it was so small that researchers didn’t even bother to track it.
Laura Wifler
It was naive, but it did feel really safe and and almost innocent and warm. And we all just kind of thought What could go wrong.
Sarah Zylstra
You know, in the history of Facebook newsfeed is probably the launch news. It was one of my favorite stories. I mean, how we kind of invented it and launched it. And, of course, the pretty crazy time right after that. That’s Mark Zuckerberg. Here’s Chris Cox, Facebook’s chief product officer in another public interview.
Unknown Speaker
The idea was to update the homepage to make it easier for people to see what was going on with their friends. We were very excited about it. And we got ready to roll it out. And we hit go. And we waited for the feedback to roll in. This is in September of 2006.
Sarah Zylstra
At midnight, the Facebook staff released a new feature that pulled together information about a user’s friends who posted a photo who changed their relationship status who was at a party and prioritized it into a constantly updating list. Facebook employees congratulated themselves on making their platform so much more interesting. And then they went to bed
Unknown Speaker
and the feedback was really negative. And we eventually got an alert from the security team that there was a protest gathering in front of our office and that we would need to be escorted out the back
Sarah Zylstra
showing everyone your photos or relationship status felt like a violation of privacy looking at someone else’s felt like you were being forced to stalk them. Someone started a Facebook group opposing the feed and a million people joined it. But while Mark Zuckerberg publicly apologized for rolling out the newsfeed without explanation, he didn’t pull it back
Unknown Speaker
the next morning, we spent a bunch of time changing the product to communicate better exactly how everything worked. People learned how to use it, and they use it a lot. And they liked it.
Sarah Zylstra
The same people who were protesting. Were also using Facebook twice as much as before. Even if the newsfeed made them feel voyeuristic, they couldn’t look away, the newsfeed was a turning point, it has shown up on social media platforms ever since. And it changed the experience in two important ways. First, it reduced the amount of effort it took to be entertained. Instead of clicking over to different pages, you only need it to scroll or refresh, it became a lot easier to spend a lot more time browsing content. And second, it changed the nature of the updates. Before you were just posting for the few friends who would bother to come and look for you. Now you are posting for everyone you ever friended, you had to be a lot more careful with what you said, What pictures you chose how you portrayed yourself. This wasn’t all bad.
Unknown Speaker
One of the upsides of social media was if someone was speaking, and sharing their story or their testimony at a gathering, they would be able to announce it on social media and then all of their sorority sisters would come or everyone from their athletic team would come and watch them. And then they would get all this positive feedback. And so there was there was great benefit to that, right, because they started to start it to something that was easily been private, their faith, maybe they were hesitant. They were a newer believer, they didn’t quite know how to communicate it, all of a sudden, there was an opportunity for them to announce it, and then get some kudos afterwards, after they shared it.
Sarah Zylstra
Melissa Ellis is on staff with crew, she watched the influence of the newsfeed expand exponentially around 2007 When the iPhone came out, social media
Unknown Speaker
was less tethered to your laptop, it began to accelerate because all of a sudden you were connected all the time, always no matter where you were. And there was free Wi Fi everywhere. And so it started to really escalate the amount of time that people were online. And then I started seeing, especially in the women, that comparison started to ramp up not that the comparison wasn’t there in other ways, but now it was compounded with not being able to get away from it in their bedrooms or in their apartments or even in class, you know, because it was always there. They always had access to it.
Sarah Zylstra
In 2010, one in five American adults had a smartphone today more than four out of five own one. Correspondingly, the amount of time spent on social media rose. These days the average global user is on for well over two hours a day, the average team is on for more than five hours. I bet you’ve seen people doing it at bus stops or restaurants or movie theaters shopping in stores pumping gas are walking down the street. Our pasture has literally changed from shoulders back and eyes up to curled over hunched over our devices. My friend’s Pilates instructor even has her class work on their lateral muscles to combat the hours they spend slouched over their screens. It’s impossible to detect or measure all the ways this has changed our society. But it correlates pretty well with our rising rates of depression and anxiety, scratch that. Actually, it corresponds with the rising rate of depression and suicidal thoughts of those under 25. Scratch that. Actually, it matches exactly with the rising rates of anxiety, depression and self harm in females under 25.
Unknown Speaker
My first social media was Instagram and I got it. The end of my junior year of high school so I was 17
Sarah Zylstra
Kaylee Morgan grew up in California about an hour from Berkeley, where she now attends College. Her dad was an executive pastor at New Life church where Kaylee came to saving faith and was baptized when she was around nine years old. Kaylee’s mom and dad were intentional about parenting. Her mom stayed home with Kaylee and her younger brother until Kaylee was in junior high when her mom went back to work as a physical therapist. Her parents were careful with technology, Kaylee didn’t have a phone until she was commuting to another town for junior high and even then she wasn’t allowed to use the phone’s camera. Her parents made it clear they had access to her texts. And she wasn’t allowed to have any social media accounts until she was a junior in high school.
Unknown Speaker
Um, I just felt very like kind of left out maybe like behind the curve a little bit. Whenever I was like, in the car with like friends that did have an Instagram, I’d be like, Oh, you have to let me scroll through your feed with you so I can see what everyone else is up to. Yeah, so it did drive me crazy a little bit I think towards like my later high school years. I kind of came to peace with it.
Sarah Zylstra
It probably helped that after high school she could sign up for social media accounts. And she did as you heard her first choice was Instagram, which was the most popular and unfortunately also the most dangerous choice she could have made. I got it tell you when I started researching social media, I did not expect Instagram to be the bad guy. A lot of my friends have actually retreated there from Facebook and Twitter, especially after the political fracturing of the last few years instant seems like the Kinder prettier sister of Facebook and Twitter and my goodness, is it pretty mainly because it was designed around images launched in 2010. After the release of the iPhone instead was the first place you could quickly and easily upload photos taken with your phone. And then you could edit and add filters to make your images even better, and then share them with your followers. Which leads to the second reason for Instagrams incredible beauty money. For ages advertisers have known that human brains process images far faster than text, you can identify the half bitten apple logo or the Nike swoosh in 1/10 of a second photos also work to target our emotions you’d rather play with a puppy I showed you than what I just told you about and they hang around in our memories a lot longer than words when you add them to a post or a blog, they get 40% more shares than posts without images. If you were an advertiser looking for a way to sell Billy Eilish T shirts, Instagram offered a brand new far more effective way to reach potential customers. Just pay a cute college girl to wear your shirt say something about how comfy it is and linked to your store. These days. Being on Instagram can feel like a mash up of keeping up with your friends and reading ads in a magazine. Every selfie or group shot is carefully chosen and edited. The work that used to go into airbrushing the cover photos of 17 magazine can now be done by everybody in your school. Kaley knows that
Unknown Speaker
I downloaded actually last week a new social media app, which if I had to guess I think it’s gonna get pretty big actually, it’s this app called V real it gives you like a notification once a day, like at a random time during the day. And within two minutes, you’re supposed to just take a selfie, and it takes a picture like facing you and the other way around to and you post it and then once you’ve posted that picture, you can see what all your friends posted. And so what’s nice about it is it’s very candid, like you get the notification and you’re like walking to class. So you just take the picture while you’re walking to class. So it feels a lot more real, a lot
Sarah Zylstra
more real. I understand why Kayleigh likes this app, but I’m not as optimistic as she is about its future mainly because unfortunately, real life is dull. If I took pictures of what I was doing on a daily basis, sleeping, eating, working, driving around, you would be bored, silly one of Instagrams draws is that it’s aspirational. It shows life as we imagine it could be the best possible version of ourselves doing the most interesting fun things we could be doing. And of course, that’s also the danger.
Unknown Speaker
The idea with Instagram, people get these like one second snapshots. And it’s like this perfect picture of like, how much fun they were having in Disneyland. And so you see that and you come up with this storyline in your head that they just had this perfect trip, they got this super cute picture because they looked so good with all their friends, they’re smiling, they’ve got the Mickey Mouse ears or if you end up going to Disneyland the next month and you maybe get some cute pictures. But then you also realize wait, I waited in line for six hours out of the day and my feet hurt the whole time and it was so hot. I was sweaty. And you know, Oh, it didn’t live up to their trip like their trip must have been so much better than my trip. Kaylee put her finger
Sarah Zylstra
exactly on what Melissa Ellis was seeing in her college girls comparison. Their trip must have been so much better than my trip. Their family must be so much closer than mine. Their friends must be so much more fun. Their classes must be so much more interesting. Their internships must be so much more meaningful. Their body, their hair, their clothes, their boyfriend, their summer plans. Everything on Instagram looks so good. It’s meant to that’s how Instagram was designed. And that’s what we like about it. It plays exactly into how God designed us, especially women to influence each other. Here’s the truth, our ability to see excellence and desire to change. To be better to do better is not a bad thing. It’s the way God made us Jen Wilkin wrote in TGC. His newest book, Social sanity and an Insta world were meant to be reshaped by the Bible and the Holy Spirit and the local body of believers to look more and more like Christ. Older women are meant to mentor younger ones. Friends are supposed to spur one another on toward goodness. It isn’t wrong to look around to line ourselves up with an outside standard and to keep checking to see if we’re where we’re supposed to be. What matters, of course, is which standard we’re using. If we’re looking at Jesus, we have both a perfect example and the power of the Holy Spirit to help us if we’re looking at someone else’s curated photos. We’re seeing an imagined perfection and we have no possible way to ever measure up. Of all the platforms. Research shows Instagram is the worst at This hits those images that grab our emotions and stick in our minds
Unknown Speaker
the way I look and the way my body is was something that God created intentionally for a reason. And like he looks at that and says, like, I love this. And for me, I think with social media, it was really hard to be able to say, I’m going to choose to believe that and that like God created me perfect when you’re looking at all these other I don’t know people that are the societal norm of perfect
Sarah Zylstra
No wonder Instagram is associated with eating disorders and appearance anxiety, especially among girls who are going through puberty or who are supposed to be at their most physically attractive age. No wonder that one in three girls who feel bad about their bodies feel worse after logging into Instagram. And no wonder teens who use social media more than five hours a day are twice as likely to be depressed as non users. That depression rate by the way starts climbing after just a single hour of use.
Unknown Speaker
Instagram has a negative impact on young girls mental health and body image
Unknown Speaker
we make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls. Facebook’s research revealed editors
Unknown Speaker
Richard Blumenthal and Marsha Blackburn are vowing to hold Facebook accountable for the impact the company is having on its young users around the world.
Sarah Zylstra
On some level, we’re doing this to ourselves. At the same time you’re consuming the casually gorgeous content of other women, you’re also creating your own.
Unknown Speaker
It’s not even necessarily insecurity about looks every time as much as it could be like insecurity about like whether or not you’re interesting. I think about going into college. I was traveling a lot whether it was like see family like sometimes it wasn’t even this like vacation thing. It was like I’m going to Texas to visit my grandma in Dallas, right? And I felt this in like pressure to capture those things, and then present them in a way that made it seem like I was like this global like traveler that was like experiencing all these different things.
Sarah Zylstra
That’s Morgan Kendrick. She graduated from Berkeley a few years ago, and now works on the campus as a reformed University fellowship staffer. She’s 25. And her brand is the interesting international traveler, but she ran into trouble between trips, because what was she going to post
Unknown Speaker
the normal rhythms of life seven, and then I was like, nothing’s up to par, like nothing’s like worthy enough for me post. So I have to do something interesting in order to feed this. So like, for me personally, I think it was doing something interesting or fun, or like going to a museum. The key there was even though I’m, like, sophisticated, and I like art, and I’m gonna like show that I like that. And if I’m not going anywhere, at least I’m like reading the right things. And then like having the right opinions based on things that consuming.
Sarah Zylstra
Like Morgan, a lot of girls can articulate their brands. The granola sustainable girl who goes apple picking the smart girl with a sarcastic one liners who goes to math camp or graduate school, the healthy outdoorsy girl who goes running and rollerblading, the Christian girl who does mission trips, and post Bible verses. None of those things are wrong, but they are limiting. The identity we create for ourselves is never as wide ranging or complex as the one that God created for us. That means, as Morgan explained, it can be hard to keep thinking of posts that are on brand. But if you get your brand, right, if you create a personality that people like and you gather followers that could catapult you into being an influencer.
Unknown Speaker
That sounds great, right? As you get like, you get free things you get to like try new experiences and then you just have to document them like that sounds amazing. I think there is this kind of like weird like, almost like Nashville singer songwriter like I want to make for me, where I’m like, just being recognized and that way would feel like a lot of power, right? And also just like affirmation of the things that you’ve kind of like wanted affirmation about am I interesting? Am I funny? And my cool,
Sarah Zylstra
basically, do people like me, do they want to be like me? Do they want to be me? There’s a line here between wanting to influence people for good and wanting to be the goddess everyone tries to emulate. If you can keep your eyes on Jesus in your identity rooted in him and your goal, only his glory, then you can post freely, completely non anxiously regardless of who likes it or who doesn’t. But if you’re trying to win the approval of other people, you will get all tangled up. Morgan explains
Unknown Speaker
my perception of what other people think of me like the elephant in the room. Just like who who does everyone else think I am and who do I think I And based on who everyone else thinks I am, and then I’m going to post based on like that, you know? So yeah, I would say it’s hard to
Sarah Zylstra
wait, who is influencing who here isn’t the influencer supposed to be the one with the power? Friends, she’s not, the power is all in the likes and the follows and the reshares. If you lose those, you lose everything, then you aren’t interesting or funny or cool. You’re just a girl with a post that fell flat, and dishes on the counter, and homework that still needs to be done.
Unknown Speaker
All right, like best friends in college kind of would get frustrated with the whole like machine of it. And so she started doing posts that she was like, I just really want to be honest on social media, like, I really want to be like, you know, forthright, and not just like sunshine and roses, or like have everything be curated and perfect. And then she kind of got to the point where she’s like, now I just feel like I’m like, I have a vulnerability hangover after I’m sad I am or how like, not that my life is. And then I do that. And I’m like that feel this, like achiness of like, I just like, kind of exposed this really vulnerable thing to my friend from middle school that I haven’t talked to in 10 years.
Sarah Zylstra
At this point, I’m thinking what happened to social media being a fun way to connect with your teammates, or your church friends or your sorority sisters, this doesn’t sound fun. In fact, this doesn’t even have the satisfaction of a deep talk with a close friend, where you both end up crying but more connected than before. What’s happening here?
Unknown Speaker
Do I think that isolation is happening because people are not as often forced to be face to face, but they can be connected with people without really being known because they’ve never asked those harder questions, or they’ve never been into a deeper conversation. And so I’m seeing more and more college students are experiencing loneliness. And that’s not new. Like that’s been something that’s been on the horizon for a few years. But the rate of loneliness and anxiety and panic is like through the roof.
Sarah Zylstra
This is an anxiety that can follow you everywhere, to class to work to your car, to your bedroom.
Unknown Speaker
It’s 2pm on a Saturday morning, and you’re you know, laying in bed scrolling through Instagram, and you see people put on their story. Oh, like girls brunch, and they have like a little picnic brunch on a Saturday. And immediately you’re like, well, they’re out having brunch, and I’m laying in bed scrolling on my phone, and you know what, maybe I needed that rest day. But now all of a sudden, I’m seeing this and saying, Hey, am I wasting my Saturday? am I wasting my time? Do I even have any friends that would go out and do a brunch with me. And now all of a sudden my like, you know, not capitalizing on my friendships or you know, wasting my day or, you know, whatever that looks like. So I would say that’s a big thing that I struggle with. And I imagine a lot of other people do, too. I just don’t think we as humans are wired to need to know or have to know what everyone else is doing every second of the day. And social media almost feels a little like counter the way that we should be or the way we are wired as humans almost, if that makes sense.
Sarah Zylstra
It makes sense to me. I’ve heard the same discussion around the news, we don’t have the capacity to absorb and process and react to all the drama that’s happening all over the world all the time. We aren’t God, we’re limited. The advice I’ve heard, maybe you have too, is to limit your news consumption. Stop overloading yourself, quit checking the news sites all the time, live inside your limits, you can apply the same logic to social media, couldn’t we just limit the time we spend there.
Unknown Speaker
I don’t know if I’ve talked to anyone my age group that like their phone is not the first thing that they like look at in the morning. And before they go to bed.
Sarah Zylstra
There are reasons for that. One is the blue light of the screen, which makes it harder for our brains, especially teen brains to feel sleepy. Another is that social media platforms make money through advertising, which means the longer you’re on there, the more money they can make. That’s why everyone uses a newsfeed type scroll or a like or reshare button, those random hits of information or affirmation send a surge of pleasure into a human brain. We like that. So we go back for more when the surges are random. We’re not sure how many people have liked our post, the urge to check is even stronger. After a while our brain gets accustomed to one level of pleasure, say an average of 30 likes for each post. And then 30 likes seems normal and boring. And we’d like say 40 or 50 to make us happy or searching for hits of pleasure and needing more and more to be satisfied. It sounds like addiction, doesn’t it? So how do you curb this addiction?
Unknown Speaker
They’re like timer apps so you can set Hey, every day I only want to spend 20 minutes on Instagram. And so it keeps track of how much time you spent on Instagram that day. And when your time limits up, it’ll give you a notification. But then there’s always an option to ignore it. So All my friends that have that notification, I’ve never really seen any of them follow it like you can usually see them like kind of ignore
Sarah Zylstra
it. The trouble is, you can ignore every well intentioned suggestion to help limit your time online. If you put your phone in another room before bedtime, you can head there first thing in the morning to retrieve it. If you move all your social media apps to a folder on the last page of your phone, you can swipe over to get them. If you turn off notifications, you can pop into your app all the time to see if you miss something, even deciding the right amount of time to try and spend on social media is problematic partly because we’re always under estimating how much time we spend scrolling, and partly because there is no right answer.
Unknown Speaker
There’s real wisdom issues there that can’t be formulaic. So the moment you say, well, here’s about a healthy amount of time, somebody’s going to say oh, it should be much less than somebody’s gonna say oh, it should be much more. It’s It’s like saying when’s a good bedtime.
Sarah Zylstra
Julie Lowe is a counselor and faculty member at the Christian counseling and Educational Foundation. When girls come to her struggling with anxiety and depression. One of the first questions she asks is how they interact with social media, it’s
Unknown Speaker
a question that has to come up. And again, kids aren’t the best gauge because they’re not connecting the dots. An example is we have parental controls on our devices. And so our kids things will let them on even Amazon Go shopping, or, or whatever it might be, it will kick them off after it hits their time limit. And they’ll say repeatedly, no way, it hasn’t been a half an hour already, right. And I think if my husband, I did the same thing, I’m sure we’d be like what I just got out of this. And that is almost like gambling, you know, in a casino that you lose track of time and space, and you lose track of things around you. And there’s part of the danger of escaping into it.
Sarah Zylstra
Julie’s husband is also a counselor, and they have four teenagers themselves, two boys and two girls, I asked her how she and her husband handled their kids social media use,
Unknown Speaker
we do try to keep all of our teens off of social media, for the most part.
Sarah Zylstra
Wait, what her kids don’t have any social media.
Unknown Speaker
You know, there’s been occasions where whenever our boys got the Oculus quest, and it requires you to be on Facebook. But we also talked about you’re not, you know, you’re not going to be friend people on Facebook,
Sarah Zylstra
Julie told me she wants to give her kids a fighting chance that when they become adults, she wants them to be able to make a decision about joining social media on their own without already being addicted to it. And then she told me that found
Unknown Speaker
the research is arguing not allow teens on social media, it’s not saying here’s the amount of limited time they should be on, it’s actually arguing not to let them on. Why? Because even a half an hour can be damaging to chat at the half an hour, they’re on some of the worst sites and they’re struggling with identity and comparing themselves or people are cyber bullying them. Or they’re sexting them, like the type of things that happen on social media are equally if not far more grievous than the amount of time my child spending on YouTube, social media, some of these things are so limiting time, of course, is important. But there’s so many other factors before you even get to the limiting the time to say what is the argument for why they should even be on this very specific site?
Sarah Zylstra
Why should they even be on this site? The girls themselves are asking this question.
Unknown Speaker
Most girls that I’ve talked to go through phases of like, I’m deleting it, I’m done. Which means that like everyone goes through a phase of like, this is too much for me, or this is hurting me or you know, or it’s annoying, whatever the negative kind of side of that is, I think everyone goes through the point with social media where they get exhausted,
Sarah Zylstra
even so it usually takes a stressful event, like a breakup with a boyfriend or a falling out with a friend for someone to actually delete their social media.
Unknown Speaker
I was on it during winter break. And I saw three engagement posts in a row. And I was like, No, and I deleted the app. Like I’m good. Like, I don’t need to be comparing my stage of life. I don’t need to be comparing my relationship status. So yeah, that was one of those moments where I was like, Okay, we’re done.
Sarah Zylstra
Avery Fong is a junior at Berkeley, where she’s also involved in reformed University fellowship, she had accounts on Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook, but never really got into Facebook and get rid of Snapchat when she realized it was basically the same thing as texting. Instagram was harder. She has two accounts there one personal and one for sharing the work she’s doing for her Architecture major. After a while, she noticed she was choosing her offline activities based on what would photograph well, we heard from her in the introduction, and she noticed she wasn’t consuming well, either.
Unknown Speaker
Every time I saw a post every single time, I’d compare myself to something in the post, whether it was one of my friends, or especially influencers or even just like there’s some good Christian women on social media that still make me feel bad about myself, because I’m like, Oh, my face doesn’t look like that right now or I like want to be in the season of life that they’re in and I’m not And they look like such great just like people in general, I couldn’t get on the app and not think something negative about myself or another person.
Sarah Zylstra
Avery’s younger sister mentioned that she and her friends were taking Instagram breaks. And Avery decided to try that too. She took a few small ones for a week or so, but didn’t really notice a difference. However, those smaller breaks probably paved the way for her bigger break. She’s been off now for several months.
Unknown Speaker
Initially, it was easier for me to get off like just do a deep disable my account, the harder part came after when I wanted to redownload it, I think I felt more lonely because of the lack of instant gratification and affirmation that comes from likes and comments. And so yeah, me wanting to get back on the app to reaffirm that I have friends
Sarah Zylstra
Avery does have friends. When she wants to redownload the app, she tells herself to text someone to say hello, or see if anybody wants to go for a quick walk, I
Unknown Speaker
have felt way less lonely. Because yeah, the kind of love that comes from someone taking time out of their day to be with you physically is definitely a million times more valuable than someone taking five seconds to comment on your posts, something that they might not even mean because it’s online, and people are bolder behind the screen. So I think relationally it’s been good.
Sarah Zylstra
It’s also been good for her mind, not
Unknown Speaker
having Instagram has given me the space to think in a more unfiltered way. And so rather than tailoring the things I want to say to a post, which is good, and I can share that with people and that can be encouraging, but for my own processing and thoughts, being able to like just journal and get out everything and not feel like I have to have things worded perfectly or I have to be totally clean, happy, joyful, and I’m writing things that’s been super cool to do.
Sarah Zylstra
I just want to underline that. Getting off Instagram helped Avery think better.
Unknown Speaker
I usually hop on voice memos and just start talking. Which is another good way of practicing again, just like how to be relational or like conversational. Rather than just being able to hold a conversation on text where you can kind of map out what you’re gonna say or what other people are gonna say knowing how to put words together I think is something that I’m still learning in this digital era.
Sarah Zylstra
Kaylee noticed something similar in her brain when she took some social media breaks,
Unknown Speaker
there’s like almost less of a buzz going on in your head. I just feel like my like head or like maybe my soul like just calms down a little bit because I don’t need to keep track of what Suzy from ninth grade is doing in Louisiana this week. All I know is what I’m doing. And what my friends are doing this week that I’ve chosen to hang out with.
Sarah Zylstra
It sounds hopeful, doesn’t it? What if young women could go back to shopping together in malls and going out to dinner with boys and eating popcorn and movie theaters? What if they could take road trips instead of selfies and have complex conversations instead of photoshoots?
Unknown Speaker
I think I finally came to the realization that having Instagram and being able to see what everyone else is doing does not bring any sort of positive like positivity to my life at all.
Sarah Zylstra
So I asked her Kaley, if that’s true, why do you keep it around? Her answer is long. But I want you to hear the whole thing because her honesty is what finally made me delete my Facebook account.
Unknown Speaker
A couple reasons. One, there’s a practical reason to it. So any clubs I’m involved in on campus, generally we have to do some advertising for fundraisers, whatever that looks like. So it’s helpful to have an Instagram account and post things on my story. Whatever that looks like another big thing for me, honestly, this is a really superficial thing. But you know, if you look at my Instagram account, like I definitely very much curate my pictures to like a little bit of like a vibe to them. I really like all the pictures of me on that, like account. Like when I look at it, I’m seeing all my favorite aspects of my life. So when I look at my personal page, it gives me I don’t know, maybe like a little bit of a serotonin boost or something like, oh my gosh, look at all these cute pictures of me, like makes me feel better about myself. This is another superficial thing. I mean, we haven’t really talked about followers very much. But like, because I’ve had my Instagram account for a while, like, I have a certain amount of followers. And if I fully deleted this account, like I would lose all of that. And so to me, it’s hard because I’m like, Okay, I could fully delete my account. But if one day I wanted to redownload it again, I’m starting from square one and have to find all these people again, it’s a lot easier for me to just choose to delete the app, but maybe leave my account there. So yeah, those are all some of them were like superficial reasons. But there’s also that practical aspects too. So I don’t know
Sarah Zylstra
For superficial reasons, for sure, but they were also my reasons. I didn’t even recognize them in myself until Kaley said them out loud. And they scared me so much I deleted the Facebook account I didn’t like but hadn’t been able to get rid of. Actually, that isn’t true. Since I was afraid I’d end up scrolling, I asked my husband to go in and delete it for me, which he was happy to do, because these young women don’t stay young women. And you won’t be surprised to learn, we don’t naturally get better at social media as we get older.
Unknown Speaker
In marriages, like far more men talk about this than women to say they come in and their wives are playing Candy Crush for hours at a time and not talking to them or they’re on their phones, surfing Facebook, or Pinterest all the time. And that that cuts down on relationships. So think how many marriages are impacted by some of those decisions as well.
Sarah Zylstra
So what can we tell young women, our daughters and sisters and nieces and friends? Here’s what Morgan tells her Berkeley students
Unknown Speaker
water that you’re swimming in is gonna affect you. And it’s okay that you’re not strong enough to control how much this affects you. It’s not a it’s not a weakness issue. It’s not a stability issue. It’s not like whether or not you’re secure enough in the Lord that you are not affected by social media like
Sarah Zylstra
she’s right. We’re humans created to influence each other. Morgan encourages her girls to take breaks, which is great advice. We can even go a little further instead of just removing social media from your life or encouraging someone else to remove it from theirs. Let’s figure out what’s going to take its place. Let’s add in relationships, add in making cookies and having coffee with a friend and reading your Bible in the quiet add in worship music while you’re driving hikes with the dog or a creative project, add in journaling and voice memos to help you think add in serving at your local church, add in soccer games, musical instruments and sand castles on the beach.
Unknown Speaker
I was reading and acts today and looking at like the beginning of the church. So the church of Antioch and thinking about they belonged so that they could be sent out. And so this idea of like if we are anchored in who Jesus has made us to be and we know where we belong to him and to his family, his community than we really should be being sent out. And right now why would that not include social media? I love
Sarah Zylstra
this. If young girls are looking to Instagram as a place to achieve the perfect identity, to find community and to learn how to live a good life, it will continue to eat them alive. But if they can come to Instagram with Identities Rooted in Jesus tied tightly to real life, friendships and mentors in their local church patterning their lives after actual saints, then couldn’t some of them enter the mission field of Instagram or Facebook. Because social media truly can help you belong before you believe it can make entering a campus ministry or a new church or a women’s Bible study easier. It can be a platform on which you can share scripture and your testimony, it can be a great way to raise awareness or to learn about all kinds of things from Mission opportunities to ways to care for an apartment, to figuring out your new community.
Unknown Speaker
I want to believe that the Lord can use this for good, but at least they’ll have to do the work as disciples of followers of Jesus to be anchored and also to help the women who are younger than us be anchored in
Sarah Zylstra
Jesus to do the work. That’s not just a mandate for the girls. It’s hard to pull your own self out of quicksand. So it’s also a challenge for the rest of us to help our young women be so anchored in Jesus that the pull of social media would grow strangely dim in the light of His glory and grace. Laura has been thinking about how a church could do that.
Laura Wifler
having real conversations about social media is really important and not pretending like it doesn’t exist or isn’t a part of women’s lives. I think as you noted, providing and creating spaces for women to get together in real life, having Bible studies, having book clubs, having get togethers and socials or whatever that looks like planning meal trains for one another, doing the hard work of everyday in and out real life living together should never be neglected. And then lastly, I would say just a focus on teaching women what discernment looks like and to say how do you know if someone is telling you something that aligns with God’s word?
Sarah Zylstra
A lot of this could fit under the instruction of Titus two for older women to teach younger women what is good and isn’t that what young women are searching for on Instagram, how to look good, how to be good, how to have a good life, but we don’t have to reach for that ourselves. Christ has already paid for our sins on the cross and declared us good in the eyes of a holy guy. There’s no picture we could take no caption we could write no amount of followers we could gather that could add anything to the finished work of Christ, younger sisters, you are good made that way by Jesus, your life is good, full of meaning and direction created that way by God. You don’t have to shape or create an identity that is already yours. You might choose to get off social media. Along with Kaylee and Avery I can tell you what a relief it is to walk away or you might choose to use it as a platform from which to speak gospel truth. Either way, if you are rooted in Jesus, you are living a good life. recorded as part of the gospel coalition’s Podcast Network. It’s written by Sarah Zylstra and produced by Josh Diaz. Our media director is Brandon McAllister, and our editor in chief is Colin Hanson. You can find more podcasts from the gospel coalition at tgc.org/podcasts
Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra is senior writer and faith-and-work editor for The Gospel Coalition. She is also the coauthor of Gospelbound: Living with Resolute Hope in an Anxious Age and editor of Social Sanity in an Insta World. Before that, she wrote for Christianity Today, homeschooled her children, freelanced for a local daily paper, and taught at Trinity Christian College. She earned a BA in English and communication from Dordt University and an MSJ from Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. She lives with her husband and two sons in the suburbs of Chicago, where they are active members of Orland Park Christian Reformed Church. You can reach her at [email protected]
