The Fight For My Daughter’s Soul

This is far from the first time I have written about my unease over social media piped into my daughter’s brains. I forswore TV for decades, not wanting it in my house. But by the time my kids came of age TV was well nigh obsolete, and now social media was the currency of the realm.

Would I take drastic action to restrict smartphones and ban social media access in my house? In the same way I have never wanted mainstream TV broadcasts and the attendant commercials in my house?

No, I wouldn’t. I still won’t.

The world my daughters live in – their friends, social groups, etc. – was online. I would not cut them off from that, for better or for worse. We adults helped make this world where social media plays so strong a role. We might as well help them to live in it.

Or more accurately, I would try to help my daughters navigate a social media world in as healthy way as possible. I did not let them sign up for social media until around seventh grade, but after that I figured trying to shut it out entirely was like hiding. This seemed to me unworkable and counterproductive.

Obviously just leaving them to marinate in the social media world without guidance and support is a bad idea. My younger daughter, in particular, comes to me all the time with the ridiculous and absurd ideas she encounters on social media. It is obvious to me that what is said to make sense online in contemporary youth culture is not the same as what makes sense in the real world. A person Very Online is almost always a person Very Unmoored. I did not want that to seem “normal” to her.

So I talk to my daughter. I give her my opinion. I explain to her the way the real world works, and I seek to help her to find her own place in it. I consider myself to be in a battle for my daughter’s soul with social media in her crucial years between 12 and 16-years of age, and I will win this fight. I even asked her a month ago, “Who has more influence on you? Me or TikTok?” She replied without pausing: You do. I feel as I have earned that response by being heavily involved in her life on a daily basis since her birth – ever since that wonderful moment when she was conceived, to when I cut her umbilical chord moments after birth, and all the way forward for the next 14 years.

But it is not that simple. The Internet has sunk its teeth into my younger daughter. She watches hours and hours of online videos about race and music and makeup and God knows what else. She absorbs ethical messages and social mores on social media constantly. She and the other members of “Gen Z” are told this is ok and that is not ok. I have no idea what the vast majority of the messages are, and frankly I have neither the time nor the inclination to submerge myself in it (if it weren’t for my daughters I would pay next to no attention to any of this stuff). Most of the TikTok videos I have seen were skin deep, childish, and/or forgettable. Others videos have more weighty messages, or so I have been told.

“Daddy, are there only two genders? Male and female?” my younger daughter asked me recently. I’m given to know theyare angrily arguing this point online with great passion. She wants my opinion. I know some people will almost have fist fights online about this controversial issue. I evade the question. If she pushes the point, I will admit speculatively that I think there are only two genders with a whole spectrum of male and female identification along the continuum. “Do you know anyone who is transgender? Is anyone from our family or friends involved in this? Is this a problem that should take much of our time and energy?” I ask her. She admits “no.” “Then let’s talk about something else,” I suggest. It is a dumb conversation, in my opinion. It affects a tiny number of people. “But if a man wants to be a woman and then has surgery, is ‘he’ now a ‘she’?” she goes on to ask me. She wants to hear her dad’s opinion. I equivocate with my answer, not wanting to give the issue more oxygen (although it seems obvious to me that a man who has his penis surgically removed is now a man without a penis).

Transgenderism is an invidious culture war flashpoint between enraged partisans engaged in political combat. This is a fight which takes place online and off. But for the vast majority of Americans transgenderism is far down the list of important national concerns. For those who want to argue about race or gender or whatever, the disputes have become like the bitter ideological enmity between Catholics and Protestants of yore. Benjamin Franklin once complained, “Persons of good sense, I have since observed, seldom fall into it [arguing about religion], except lawyers, university men, and men of all sorts that have been bred at Edinburgh.” I would update Franklin’s observation to read “persons of good sense” are seldom seen screaming at or threatening (ie. trying to “cancel”) each other on “X,” the social media site formerly known as Twitter. It is akin to peeing in the wind.

It has gotten so bad that sometimes my younger daughter will bring up some obscure and outrageous act or argument, and I will respond, “Did you hear that on social media?” My daughters consume hour after hour of online media. My younger daughter, in particular, is often staring at her screens for hours each day. I take her iPhone or iPad away and tell her to give it a break. “Come talk to me,” I tell her. She does not fight me. But the moment she is free she is back staring at the dancing pixels on her digital devices. It is as if my younger daughter flees from real world boredom by escaping to online world titillation. I carefully restrict her time on these devices with Apple “Screen Time” controls, and all of them shut off an hour before bedtime. I put limits on both my daughter’s Internet exposure. Nevertheless, the iOS informs me that both my daughters spend several hours each day on their phones. Over time those hours add up. 

How influential is that on my daughter’s upbringing? What is the effect of the steady stream of online media on their minds and souls? It is worrisome. I am far from the first parent nowadays to fret about the influence of social media on their children. What are they learning? Am I naïve in gauging the true depth and breadth of social media’s influence on my daughters? Do I underestimate the power of connected digital devices and growing up online? Supposedly the tech titans who themselves profit so greatly from these technologies won’t let their own children use them: that would be a telling detail.

I have noticed it is often the loud and the sensational who get attention online. Real life can be boring, and standard news often is also (“Inflation Reaches 6%”); but “fake news,” clickbait, scandal, and outrage tends to attract viewers (“COVID-19 mRNA Vax Causes Mass Heart Attacks in Teens”). This is what I have often seen on social media. I have heard the weird and the extreme online refer to average everyday people as “normies.” Yes, I am a normal person. And I am raising my daughter to be a normal person – a “normie.” Social media can come to resemble a carnival house of mirrors where reality is distorted and outrageous behavior and drama-mongering get more attention than they deserve; such is the business model, after all: do whatever it takes to get attention to a viewer, and then sell targeted advertising to them. That is how Google and Facebook have made hundreds of billions of dollars. I get it. But the Internet culture nowadays clearly has the potential to be a horrible influence on a young person. So I will not leave my daughter to wander in the social media world without me being a strong counterweight. I don’t want her to think that becoming a “YouTube influencer” means being important or doing good in the real world. It doesn’t.

But the social media world is far from being all bad. My daughter’s club soccer team posts highlight videos from games and team-building messages on Instagram. The coaches in her boxing gym post updates about their upcoming professional fights, and my daughter feels included in the community there. The constant text messages between the girls is how Gen Z communicates. There are gobs of TikTok and SnapChat topics of conversation which are the stuff of contemporary youth culture. There would be a real opportunity cost in denying my daughters participation in these mediums. This is the world, part of it digital, their generation lives in. I will not take draconian action to ban it from their lives, or try to. That is how I see it, after having thought long on it.

But I will be a constant presence in the moral and ethical upbringings of my daughters, too. And I trust that my example, in various direct and indirect ways, will prove more weighty than some stranger online. “What you do speaks so loudly I cannot hear what you are saying,” Ralph Waldo Emerson claimed rightly. “Preach the gospel at all times and if necessary, use words,” St. Francis of Assissi urged wisely. All good advice, which I seek to follow.

Social media will lose, and I will win. Or looking at it with more nuance, social media might be influential for my younger daughter, but I will be indispensable to her. When the latest social media trend or controversy has expired, and all the drama and dumbness is long gone and forgotten, I will still be around. My daughters are my flesh and blood, and we are bound by ties of love and obligation in a dense web of familial connection – stretching back long before I was born. I am taking the longview. TikTok is not. I am raising my daughters to be decent women contented with the lives they have built for themselves. TikTok is trying to create drama and excitement online to attract viewers and thereby sell targeted ads to young people. They don’t know or care about my daughters, not really. As a father, I am all in. TikTok isn’t.

But I also take nothing for granted. If I don’t stand up and get involved in the lives of my daughters on a daily basis – if I become distracted or too busy – then others will raise my daughters instead. Social media influencers, trashy friends, manipulative boyfriends, middle school drama. Nature abhors a vacuum, and if I don’t raise my daughters, someone or something else will. That much is clear. 

Parents, be warned. 

Raise your kids. Or others will. This has always been true. But maybe it is truer than ever in the age of social media.

As for me, I am doing my best. I am paying attention

And if I am wary of social media, I am confident in myself (and my wife), without being overconfident or naïve (I hope). 

And I am confident in my daughters. With a bit of guidance and much love, they will be fine.

Amen.

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