When I was growing up, I was constantly reminded by my parents, my teachers and my church leaders to resist peer pressure. I was told, “Evil company corrupts good morals” (1 Cor. 15:33). This was certainly good advice. Our peers can hold a tremendous amount of power over a young person. They want to be liked and feel like they belong. So, when a crowd shows them a certain amount of acceptance, they may conform to any number of trends or habits within that group.
When I was in high school, the number of peers that might have influence over me was probably somewhere around fifty. I had close friends in the youth group at church and in the drama club at school. Back then, MySpace was the only social media platform, and all of the friends that I had on MySpace were the same people I knew in real life. My world of influence would be considered pretty small by today’s standards. But, that was still enough to sway me to make several detrimental mistakes in my youth.
The peer pressure we had as children doesn’t come close to comparing to what today’s youth are facing. Not only do our children have pressure from friends they know in real life, but they also receive pressure from millions of social media influencers and users tailored to prey on their most base curiosities. Every Google search they make or website they visit is recorded and sent to social media platforms to shape what pages, profiles and forum threads they are recommended and what ads they see. Any doubt or question they have about morality could bring them to a page with thousands of people with different religious values, upvoting the most popular takes.
We need to understand what this kind of influence is having on children today. According to the news site, The Hill, “The CDC says the number of LGBTQ students went from 11 percent in 2015 to 26 percent in 2021.” How did we get to a point where one in four teens is openly identifying as LGBTQ? It is the pressure of social media. For the first time in history, our children have a popularity-based system of measuring their worth. What matters is not how many of my friends compliment me or invite me to hang out. What matters is how many “Likes” my post gets from complete strangers. The more shocking the post, the better the reception.
“Evil company corrupts good morals.” What kind of company are your kids keeping online? They may have ten friends at church. How many friends do they have on Instagram?