Delaying social media? Help tweens understand the harm of highlight reels while they wait.
Hi friends!
If you're delaying social media for your kids, there's a good chance you've weathered their pushback and questions: "But why do I have to wait?"
Congrats! This is a golden opportunity to offer grounded, calm tidbits of truth about social media realities--to empower our kids with agency to choose a better path for themselves. Ultimately, we don’t want them to understand our why…we want them to develop their own why.
In mini-lesson #3, I’m unpacking one of the pressures our t(w)eens feel as they wait for social media... the desire to be seen and known. I hope these talking points help you shed light on difficult realities for your kids!
xo, kb
When I was nine, my mom came home from Town East Shopping Center with exciting news: she had spent the day at Glamour Shots. Once the coolest store in every mall, these studios were a one stop beauty shop, fashion fix, and photoshoot. The result was big hair, smoky eyes and puckered lips…all squeezed into a framed moment of glory. (Love you, Mom!)
As much as we giggle, the truth is we humans have been squeezing our lives into frames for centuries. Art museums are chock full of large-scale, full-length paintings that portray historical figures in trendy, elaborate fashion…holding the most flattering (if awkward) poses…making sure to capture favorite objects (dogs, hunting scenes, and weapons) in the background. Perfectly curated aesthetics. Highlight reels of their day-to-day lives.
Sound familiar?
Here’s the thing: Because God is a Creator, He made us to create. Whether we were born in 2024 or 1624, God gave us a longing to make beautiful things…and to be known by them. The problem is, when we use social media as a creative outlet, this desire for beauty can accidentally skew us to point the camera to the beautiful parts of our lives, and hide the parts that are cracked and broken. Let’s take a look at how this age-old problem plays out in today’s world…
A couple of years ago, a beautiful twenty-two-year old travel blogger named Gabby Petito made all of the news headlines when she went missing on a highly Instagramable cross-country camping trip with her boyfriend. The photos in her feed were filled with mountain tops, coffee shops, ocean shots…all through the lens of a warm, sunny filter. But behind the beautiful images, trouble was brewing with this young man, and after several months of her family searching, she eventually was found dead. The beautiful story that the world saw on Instagram was not the whole story.
Gut-wrenching, right? It’s hard to understand why someone would make it look like her life was perfect when she really needed help. But before we point fingers, we need to recognize that apart from Jesus, this is our story. You and me. Sharing the happy parts of our lives feels safer. Maybe if we make things look pretty or perfect, it will distract me from the painful things going on in my life.
Because if you are like me or Gabby Petito, you’ve got battle wounds. Some small…some utterly devastating. You’ve been hurt. You’ve hurt others. You’ve lost loved ones. You’ve been left out and forgotten. And all of these hard things…these, too, are an important part of your story.
The Japanese have a way of honoring the broken parts of life through an art form called Kintsugi. When a piece of pottery breaks, rather than discard it as useless, they fill in the cracks with gold. To them, the golden cracks make the pieces even more precious and valuable.
The unspoken rules of social media (especially apps with photo/video editing capacities like Instagram or TikTok) tell us that if we don’t like imperfections in our life, we can just put throw that piece away. Cover it up. Airbrush the photobomber. Apply a warm filter. And when things are really bad…there’s always AI.
But if we want to become more and more like Jesus, we need to ask him to help us see our lives through His eyes. The Lord sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart. (1 Sam 16:7) When He looks at our social media posts, He quickly sees that each post is just a tiny piece of a much bigger puzzle. And behind the scenes…the broken, difficult, or painful parts are usually where He’s working, creating even deeper light, gold, and beauty.
So. While it’s easy to hope that social media can help us get to know each other…it’s actually like we’re trying to peek at a masterpiece through a mousehole. Sometimes, the most beautiful things to behold about our lives cannot be squeezed into a tiny frame.
So here’s our challenge: if we want to use social media to get to know other people better, let’s pray God will give us eyes to look beyond the frame. To know that even behind perfectly edited posts, people are fighting hard battles.
And when we see inappropriate or harmful things? Let’s pray God will give us His heart, and the grace to recognize how in many ways, we are just like “them”—people who are hurting. People with a much bigger story than what others can see on our social media feed…people like Cinderella.
In the final scenes of Disney’s live action version of this classic tale, a humble, unfiltered Cinderella gathers the courage to reveal the broken pieces of her bigger story to her prince. As she bravely walks down a staircase with a tattered dress and a head held high, the narrator reads: One of the hardest things we can do is allow others to see us as we really are…
In order to be truly known, we must have the courage to allow others to see beyond our social media posts. This happens best in the slowness of offline spaces, with people who will handle our broken pieces with care—and it often takes years, tears, and lots of “tennis match” conversations.
Ultimately, the only one who fully knows us—even parts of ourselves we haven’t yet seen—is Jesus. He knows all the pieces of our story—the good, the bad and the ugly—beginning to end: For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known. 1 Cor 13:12
Friends, nothing we could post on social media could help others know us the way God knows us. And because of Jesus, nothing we could post could make Him love us more or less.
As we create beautiful things in the world, let’s remind ourselves they are beautiful…because He is beautiful. And when we get the itch to move beyond delaying social media to using social media as a creative outlet— let’s hit the “reverse” button on the selfie, and point our cameras to God’s story more often than our own.
Author Krista Boan
Krista Boan is the co-founder of the international nonprofit Screen Sanity , host of the Screen Sanity podcast and a former middle school teacher. Her current work is developing simple social media mentorship resources for tweens, which she shares through the Social Compass newsletter. Krista has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, NBC with Diane Sawyer, the New York Times and Christianity Today. She lives in Kansas City with her husband and four t(w)eens.
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