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The Pastor's Heart with Dominic Steele
Christian leaders join Dominic Steele for a deep end conversation about our hearts and different aspects of Christian ministry each Tuesday afternoon.
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The Pastor's Heart with Dominic Steele
Marshall Ballantine-Jones: Pastors helping parents talk to teens on social media, the internet and porn
The average 11-year-old spends 4.5 hours daily on non-school screens. By 15, 70% of boys regularly view pornography. This isn't harmless fun—it's rewiring young brains during critical development.
The addictive nature of social media, the mental health impact on teens, distorted identity and comparison, the way the attention economy undermines discipleship.
Parents (and pastors) so often feel out of their depth.
Marshall Ballantine-Jones created the Digihelp school curriculum addressing sexualised media, and the Resist Recovery Program.
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It is the pastor's heart and Dominic Steele and today, pastors helping parents talk to teens about social media, the internet and pornography.
Speaker 1:There is the addictive nature of social media, the mental health impact on teens, distorted identity and comparison, and the way the attention economy teens distorted identity and comparison and the way the attention economy undermines discipleship and parents so often feeling out of their depth. Our youth leaders here asked me a month or so to run a seminar for parents on these topics and we lined up the seminar, set a date, publicised it and then the Adolescent series came out on Netflix and that has changed the conversation again. But to guide me on how to prepare the seminar for our church and hopefully to guide you on a seminar at your church, we have Marshall Valentine-Jones with us. He created the DigiHelp School Curriculum Program addressing sexualised media and also the Resist Recovery program. You can see that at resistprogramorg. Now, marshall, let's start with this adolescent series that has made such a splash on Netflix and it's become, I mean really all the rage amongst the educators and is amongst the educators and is raising really alarming questions about parental neglect.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's amazing how volatile the reaction has been in the media, amongst schools, amongst parent groups, amongst community leaders that an otherwise provocative but interesting story is so captivating. It's gripped, our society's thinking it's gripped, and part of it is. It's putting a very clear challenge out to carers of children, parents and school leaders about the risks their children are posed by the internet and particularly to what extent the parent and leadership neglect may contribute to the worst outcomes that those risks pose.
Speaker 1:A boy does something really bad because of the influence of the internet.
Speaker 2:So yeah, without being a party pooper and spoiling it for those who haven't seen it, because people should see it if they're a parent the premise is a boy's been accused of murder of a peer and he comes from a very ordinary family and when they examine him it almost seems irrational that this could happen. But they dig deeper and they start to see that he's been influenced by various things, including the internet, some of the incel culture, andrew Tate and others, and they're wondering whether this has been a catalyst for a diabolical crime. And it puts the question on us as carers is the internet that our children are exposed to capable of taking a normal, healthy and loved child and turning them into something diabolical?
Speaker 1:I mean there's all sorts of kind of I mean before we actually get to some solutions. I'm just sort of exploring problems or issues that are surrounding us at the moment. We've got the social media laws in the social media age raised from 13 to 16 in Australia, although not in many of the other places where people are watching and listening to us.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's right. So some of your audience will be familiar with Jonathan Haidt's recent publication, the Anxious Generation, which came out last year. It's still a New York Times bestseller, and it did a remarkable job at exposing the recent research on the effects of social media on mental health, anxiety, depression and adolescent well-being, and from it he puts forward some pretty potent arguments for why the age of access to social media needs to be raised to 16. And so, as it happens, there was a very quick but bipartisan decision made at our federal level late last year to raise the minimum age of access to a social media account to 16, when it was previously 13. So that's the sort of current discussion happening. But, as a researcher, the first thing that I would want to note and I think people need to understand that when it was 13 as the minimum age, the average age that someone was having a social media account for the first time was actually 11 and a half, and so the immediate question is does a law like this actually become?
Speaker 1:So setting the law at 16 might pull it up to 14 or something.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, people are going to ask is this going to make any difference? That they're already jumping on, on average at 11 and a half. What's the point of having a minimum age? How do you enforce it? Well, park that to the side, because I think these laws are really targeted at the big tech companies as opposed to child behavior, but they do give permission for schools and for parents to actually say no and go against the tide of pressure that the adolescent culture puts on them.
Speaker 1:You just alluded to big tech and I mean I think we're talking predatorial methods through algorithms.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah, big tech. You know the big ones are Facebook, instagram, same company, even YouTube, TikTok, snapchat. They are all aggressively and vigorously trying to harvest our children's attention and loyalty, and they do it very cleverly. They do it through identifying their profiles and then targeting them with content that will be not just interesting to them but also be captivating, even displacing to them. And they use the dopamine cycle, with the very basic technology of the thumb scroll, with the reels, to just keep them hooked on getting content, which eventually takes them down a spiral of dependency.
Speaker 2:And these big tech companies are in ruthless competition with each other for profits, right? So they're working very hard to not just win the children over, but to win them against the competition and to capture them for themselves. And so what happens is a kid at 11, 12, sometimes younger gets their phone from mom or gets the iPad, gets the account and big tech immediately starts thrusting content at them. It's going to suck them into this addictive cycle, and this is at a time in their life where they're just about to embark upon massive neurological change as they prepare for adulthood. And what this intrusive activity from big tech does is it? Basically? It reshapes their wiring of their brain and stunts, distorts and eventually corrupts their not just thinking, but their feelings and then their behaviours. And we have this massive worldwide catastrophe at the present of mental health disorders amongst young people which we've never seen before, and big tech has been a massive contributor to that problem.
Speaker 1:So what's your recommendation to Christian parents? Well, I think what do you want to say to me as I try to educate Christian parents at this seminar?
Speaker 2:Yeah, Well, I think the first thing we need to call out what's going on. We need to understand just how prevalent not only the access is to social media, to other forms of digital entertainment like computer gaming and so forth, and pornography as well. I mean, these are so prevalent that basically, what they're doing is they're washing over our kids on vast numbers. We've got to, we've got to explain that and what harm that does, so that parents are informed that they don't just realize that this is a benign issue. It's just a bit of harmless fun, it's just good distraction, it doesn't hurt me as much, says the parents. No, this is kids at their most formidable age of change, and so, yeah, we need to call out the damage and then we need to start giving some very basic but clear instructions about limiting access. So limiting access is the first thing we want to really instruct parents to do. Kids don't need a smartphone at 11. If they need a phone to get in contact because they missed the bus after school, well, okay, we'll get them a dumb phone, but we don't need a smartphone, and so we certainly want to hold back the frequency of exposure to these things. Then, really, we want to start looking at the culture of that family, because it's not just a family of rules and restrictions. That's very important. That does make a difference. But we also want parents who converse with their children, talk with them, teach them, educate them, share worldviews with them, understand the child's worldview and model. Parents need to. They need to need to model their tech habits. I mean, it's one thing to say no, you can't be on your phone, no, you can't have a social media account, but then you know you're always on it yourself.
Speaker 2:I think parents need to look at their own behaviors, but they also need to model good relating, because I think if there's one helpful thing from this adolescence series is it really exposes the type of relational harm that can happen in a cohort of young people if you let them run loose with the influence of technology.
Speaker 2:Well, kids, I know, with my work, I go around to schools and I go out to churches. I speak to tens of thousands of kids a year and we ask them what's it like for you? And what we hear everywhere we go is that there is just rife sexualized behaviors. The girls sadly and tragically cop a disproportionate amount of harmful attention, primarily from boys. A lot of it's to do with the influence of pornography, but all the while, in the school communities and church communities we actually have a higher rate of sexual harassment. And you know behaviours basic behaviours of decency and empathy and kindness need to be relearned by a lot of these young kids because they've been educated to be dysfunctional, educated to be harmful because of the online content. So parents can model good relating in the way they speak with each other, the way they live with each other, the way they relate through problems and so forth, and basically show children a better and more loving way to resolve their relational challenges.
Speaker 1:Because you surprise me. I mean, I'm just showing my out-of-touchness here. I had imagined that all the publicity around the Me Too movement of a couple of years ago would have had an impact on better behaviour amongst younger people, but you're saying it's still rife.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, the irony is, since the Me Too movement, the reports that we have amongst the experiences of teenagers today is worse than what it was before the you know, the me too movement, and we shouldn't be surprised when we actually what's your interpretation of that?
Speaker 1:well, because, I mean I'm surprised. You say I shouldn't be surprised well, there's two reasons.
Speaker 2:One is just the unrelenting influence of online sexualized culture through the internet on young people. It just doesn't stop. When a boy gets his phone in year six, again, the average age of first time exposure to pornography is 11 and a half. What he's seeing today 2025, is so extreme, so callous, um, it's so harmful. This just reinforces a way of thinking of other people which is um. It overcomes the consent and the respect messages that are being rolled out in schools, like that. One good thing about the me too movement. But it did give educators the motivation to change sex ed and consent respect was one of the, I guess, spear point strategies that they have brought in to offset these sexualized behaviors. But you can't keep up at school with a once a year program with the hours a day education that they're getting online. So it's a race and essentially who's winning is the online educators, namely the pornographers and the sexualisers.
Speaker 1:Okay. So I mean you talk about a once-a-year program. I mean I'm going to have a seminar for parents at our church. I mean I'm going to have a seminar for parents at our church. You say boys are having their first encounter with pornography at 11 and a half. What would you say that we should talk about in our seminar for parents?
Speaker 2:Well, I think one of the things we want to talk about is that you have to understand that you're in a competition and you need to have a culture of education with your young people, with your children. You need to not just have the talk or take them to a seminar or do a study or a program, but they need to be in a persistent and consistent process of healthy, holistic, godly, grace-driven, loving, other-person-centered, human-affirming education. Be prepared to have those conversations and set that tone and cultivate a countercultural and a revolutionary mindset to how we understand each other, how we understand good sexuality.
Speaker 1:Now that sounds like a good practice to have. What if I'm a parent watching? Or what if I'm a pastor watching? Or if I'm a pastor aware that probably there's a number of families in our church where they haven't got that culture at the moment? How do we I mean I presume you can't do 180-degree change the first day there's actually got to be how would you go about bringing that about?
Speaker 2:It's a great question. With my parent seminars, we do spend a bit of time on this. There's two types of parents that we will be addressing. One are the new parents, who this is all before them, and we're encouraging them to set up the culture well so that their children could resist the issues that come to them as time goes on.
Speaker 2:but we're also doing recovery for others, and so often it is parents of teenagers, and the kids have had their phone for three years, four years already, and now they're for the first time realising oh my goodness, this is actually really bad.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean we do have a generation who got Facebook or Instagram at 13 and now Other parents.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, yeah. So what we're saying is that with with these situations, first and foremost, you need to work out your strategy and you need to work what, what your goals are. What will be the standard that I want moving forward? And with your spouse, um, if you're in that situation, I know that there are single parents out there.
Speaker 1:But yeah, I'm just thinking what about when you've got a divorced couple and mum and dad disagree on this issue? That's a whole other problem.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's not uncommon, so it's a common problem. I come across this a lot and it's difficult, but where you can try to negotiate the right outcomes and discuss where you can why this is important so that you can be on the same page, because in the end, you want to make sure that when it comes to having, I think, what will invariably be a showdown with the child about the change of the world order at home.
Speaker 1:So it's likely to be a door slamming moment. It can be.
Speaker 2:But I think because no kid likes to hear hey, no, and they also don't want to have their what has now become dependent love that I'm actually addicted here. Yeah, taken away from me, it will be displacing for them. So people may not know this, but the average a recent study said that the average amount of time that an Australian child spends on screens a day that's not school-related by mid-high school is four and a half hours. Three years ago, the average amount of time they spent on social media a day was about two hours. These numbers have gone up.
Speaker 2:You take that away from them, you're like ripping out something from there that's so important. It's going to leave a gaping hole and it's going to feel difficult. So there's a lot more that we can say about how to handle that very process in them, but at least you need to work on your strategy. And if you can wind it back, a couple of words of assurance and also warning to parents. The first, actually I'll go with the warning first. The way that you and your child are relating with each other, as in, if it's a good quality relationship, if it's happy and balanced, that's not an indicator to the amount of difficulty or potential problem that the online world is having on them. You can't predict your child's online effects and influences based on your quality of relationship. So that's the first thing, and studies are showing that parents persistently underestimate how much negative influence the online world is having on them, including how much sex ed they're getting from pornography males and females.
Speaker 1:You had a second point, then I want to jump into pornography.
Speaker 2:So the second point is that if you do have a conflict with your child, a conflict doesn't reduce the quality of the relationship that you have with your child and it won't reduce their self-esteem and it won't reduce their emotional stability. So parents often fear, when they say no and they have a World War III with Sally or John about this, that the kid's going to hate them and it's just not worth going there. Well, actually the kids don't hate you, even if there is a fight. They feel secure in that and they actually realize, if you're explaining why you're coming down with these rules, that you love them and it's for their good outcome. And so in the immediate it won't feel good, but later they will reflect. I can give a testimony my family, I, I was like this with my three adult children. They all say to me now Dad, we hated your rules, we hated your restrictions, we hated the fights, but we're so glad you did it, you see, so don't fear the fight.
Speaker 1:We've had our young adult children say similar things to us recently too.
Speaker 2:yeah, so it's worth it. It won't harm the relationship, yeah.
Speaker 1:Say, I've got an 11-and-a-half-year-old and I think they might have seen pornography. How do I do that conversation, or I think their friends are seeing it, and so how do I give me a role play of how you might do that conversation?
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, it will always feel uncomfortable to have this conversation, but I think you just want to ask them, sit them down, say, look, I'm not going to judge you, but I really want to understand what it's like for you. So tell me, have you seen any of this? Are you aware of? If your friends have seen this, if they try to show you, how did it make you feel? What did you want to do? What was your thoughts about disclosing that to me? Were you worried how I'd react and start the conversation going? You know it's interesting Parents. Often a reaction of a good parent who's put in principles and processes their reaction to the kid who discloses that looked at porn or done something else that's not right online is to be angry and to feel hurt.
Speaker 2:And that could be quite a right and justified reaction because you feel that they've been deceitful or whatever it is.
Speaker 1:Disrespecting women.
Speaker 2:Disrespect all those things. And yet what we need to realize is it's the parent who the kid never tells. That's the parent who really needs to be worried. When your kid tells you that they've seen something, done something, you need to pause and realize this is actually a moment of opportunity. It was brave for them to say it and they really need help.
Speaker 2:And I can't impress upon parents enough how helpless the kids are in this wild world out there and we need to give them a little bit of slack, a little bit of grace. The pornographers and the predators and big tech are all out there like hungry beasts after them, and they've got their friends and their peers and peer culture, which is so powerful and potent. And you know, should we be surprised that something eventually got through the cracks and reached them? No, at this point, when they tell you you've got an opportunity and your opportunity is to now start to shepherd them in a loving and in an understanding way into right thinking, right behaviors. And so I just be careful of that first reaction back, because it might be the reason that they never come to you again if you bite their heads off too early and then, once they've disclosed something to you.
Speaker 2:You need to start opening up the conversation more regularly because you might need to debrief on the content that they've seen and work through that, because there's some stuff out there which is traumatic just to know that it exists, let alone see visually. And then we need to start the healthy conversations about how to treat people and where a person's identity and value is and what God's got to say about good relationships and a good long term. I think it's really important parents take these chances to paint the positive picture the positive picture of what God has planned for young people and what you as parents, want for your young people, and why that's a positive picture and why it's worth waiting for holding back from being different now to attain, and if that's, a healthy relationship in the future, healthy friendships and so forth, being respected yourself and treated as a person, not as an object. These are all great conversations which we can instill now by laying down the vision.
Speaker 1:What kind of culture can we, as church leaders, work to create, both amongst the families and in the youth program that will be supportive in this space.
Speaker 2:It's a great question. It's a broad question. I think, as leaders, we've got to look at a few things. We've got to look at what proportion of conversation we give to our teaching programs and into our Bible studies and so forth, which acknowledge and engage with the pressure of online sexualisation, because this is everywhere Every Netflix show, every streaming show, ads, music clips and then, of course, social media feeds and pornography. It's everywhere, right? So most people in our congregations will be bombarded by this adults and children, families, singles how do?
Speaker 1:you do. I mean for some smaller churches and even medium-sized churches. There's an issue of we've got one group of teens or two age groups of teens and how do we do age-appropriate discussions? What's your advice there? Because my sense is some parents are going to be saying that's too risque discussion for my year 7s to be in, and yet it's the necessary discussion for the year 10s and 12s to be in.
Speaker 2:Well, I think the church leaders should have a sit down and discuss with the parents what would be an appropriate way to approach it, because the parents need to give consent to these type of discussions.
Speaker 1:Discussions yeah, keep going.
Speaker 2:And I think you already gave the answer in your question the way that we approach different age groups needs to be in an age-appropriate way and, yes, when I speak to Year 7, there will be some kids who will be aware of the darker side of the internet.
Speaker 2:But speak to year seven, there'll be some kids who will be aware of the darker side of the internet, but the other kids will be potentially completely ignorant, and so we don't want to thrust those ignorant kids into the dark world unnecessary but I think you don't have to to be able to talk about in general why the online world is risky, potentially harmful, and we need to talk about the values and aspects of humanity that is endowed in scriptures, about our worth as image bearers of God, about people who are redeemed by the love of Christ, how love is the driving force.
Speaker 2:So we can talk about those values and apply them in a way which can touch in on the internet world or in their peer and peer relationships and online engagements, which don't have to go overtly down the tunnel of darkness, but it says enough for those who are there to know that it's a call out to them to come out. So that can be done. But it's not just how you do it, it's how often you do it. I think you need to again strategically think through how regularly you visit these topics, because if this is the raging world that they're in, you have to meet that in proportion. So I think every term there should be a focus on these issues in the youth group programs.
Speaker 1:Every term.
Speaker 2:Yeah, four times a year, A topic should touch in on social media and the risks of it. There are aspects to this that might be multiple sessions, Pornography, of course. I think it needs to be called out and realizing that by 15 in a church, 70% of the boys will be looking at it regularly, right by 15 years old. So that's normal, that's statistical. 20% of the girls, 100% of them, will be on social media. So you know, this is not foreign to most of these kids.
Speaker 1:But if you're not meeting their world with a biblical response, well then you're saying tacitly that that's not important to you Now, if you're a church like ours which does systematic Bible teaching most of the time, how would you I mean you've got teenage or you've had teenage kids. You know how did you encourage. You were a pastor when they had teenage kids. You know how did you encourage and you were a pastor when they were teenage kids. You know how did you encourage your local youth group to manage these issues.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I can understand.
Speaker 1:One topical night a year, you know. But how did you do it?
Speaker 2:you know, in the Okay, when I was a youth leader, when I was in that role, we didn't have anywhere near the threat of the internet that we have now. Yeah, Okay, when I was a youth leader, when I was in that role, we didn't have anywhere near the threat of the internet that we have now. 2010 was when I left parish ministry, so the world's changed vastly A lot. Yeah, the smartphone had not even become mainstream by then, and that is the big game changer. So I can only give advice moving forward based on what I see now, and that is, I think the teams need to have a serious planning about how they're going to allocate responses to all the topics, and if you're going to be doing expository and systematic sort of topics, you need to have breaks so that you can put in the topical in between.
Speaker 2:And I think you also talked a bit leaders about the culture that they lead by with their kids. What are they like, not just with what they say, but how they live, how they engage with each other, how they conduct themselves on the online world, how they use their phones those sorts of things that will be caught by the kids as well as taught, you see. So we want to make sure that we're setting up good behavior standards amongst our leadership teams. We want to make sure that we're setting up good behaviour standards amongst our leadership teams.
Speaker 1:How do you encourage me, as a senior pastor, to do that with the youth leader, kids leader teams?
Speaker 2:I talk about it with them and listen to them.
Speaker 2:I think the thing about senior pastors is that if we didn't grow up with a smartphone as a teenager, we don't understand their world. It's almost incomprehensible to imagine that every part of your life intersects with the internet, because we've had so much of our life not internet affected, right? I grew up my teen years and it didn't exist, you see. So I don't know what it's like to have all my music, all my socializing, all my media, everything coming through the internet. I've got to listen to what it's like for them. I've got to understand not just the pressures but how they function and so that we can start to harness their insights into the strategic brainstorming about approaching the next generation with helpful content to lead them through it.
Speaker 1:Now, just in terms of wrapping up, it sounds like you're encouraging Jonathan Haidt's Sanctious Generation book for parents. What other reading do you want?
Speaker 2:I think that's a good book. I think Patricia Wirikun's recent publication, parenting by the Book is a good one. You'll find that at Coorong or YouthWorks Media and other places. That's a terrific guide. There's various online resources. I would point you to the resistpornorg website, which is the sister site to the other one you mentioned, which is resistprogramorg. It was set up by the Sydney Anglicans and it's associated with my resist ministries, and it has a suite of helpful resources for parents to go and upskill on things from conversation to thinking through at-home habits and private behaviours personal behaviours as well. So there's some good resources there for them to dig into.
Speaker 1:Great Thanks very much for coming in. My pleasure, Marshall Ballantyne-Jones has been my guest. Marshall created the DigiHelp school curriculum addressing sexualised media and the Resist Recovery Program, resistprogramorg. My name is Dominic Steele. You've been with us on the Pastor's Heart and we will look forward to your company next Tuesday afternoon.
