Are Teens Influencing or Being Influenced by the World?

June 8, 2021 John Beeson

Are you encouraged or discouraged about teens? If you’re a teen, what is your perception of your peers? Are you hopeful? Or pessimistic? A massive global study on the state of teens worldwide was just released from One Hope.[i] In the report, we find reasons to be encouraged and causes for concern.

Spending time reflecting on what teens believe and do ought to help shape the way we pray for them and relate to them. I’ll process five sections of the report: Christian practice, struggles, social media, sexuality, and the meaning of life in teens’ lives and then draw some conclusions.

On Christian Practice:

51% of US teens claimed to be Christian, yet only 8% display the beliefs and habits of a committed Christian.
46% of Christian teens never read the Bible.
58% of Christian teens believe they don’t have a responsibility to share their faith.

I appreciate that One Hope didn’t just crank out their survey with a Christians vs. non-Christians binary, they dug into beliefs and practices. Much more important than whether one identifies as a Christian or not are their beliefs and practices. One Hope defined a committed Christian as one who:

Believes that God exists and they can have a personal relationship with him.
Believes Jesus is the Son of God.
Believes that forgiveness of sins is only possible through faith in Jesus Christ.
Believes the Bible is the Word of God.
Prays at least weekly.
Reads Scripture on their own at least weekly.

These are pretty strong criteria. If I had my druthers, I would have included weekly church attendance and a higher standard of praying and reading the Bible than once a week. But only 8% of teens qualified as committed Christians even by these fairly loose restrictions.

As parents, one of the most important things we can do is to have regular family devotion times that include prayer and reading the Bible. We are setting up our teens for failure if we put the responsibility on them to have quiet times on their own. While I would certainly want to encourage my teens to have their own quiet times, I think that creating familial rhythms is much more sustainable than putting the pressure on them to carve out healthy spiritual practices on their own.

On Struggles:

60% of teens and 30% of committed Christian teens struggle with depression.
35% of teens and 12% of committed Christian teens struggle with suicidal thoughts.
50% of teens and 36% of churchgoing Christian teens struggle with pornography.
48% of 13–15-year-olds have viewed porn in the past 3 months.
51% of 18–19-year-olds have viewed porn in the past 3 months.
Unmarried Christian teens are more likely than non-Christian teens to be sexually active.

This should sober us. Many older people critique teens and young adults as entitled or lazy without first empathizing with them. It is staggering that 60% of teens struggle with depression and a jaw-dropping 35% of teens struggle with suicidal thoughts. There are a lot of ways that the world is easier today than it was 50 years ago, but mental health is not one of them.

Take a look at how these challenges are hitting young teens. 13-15 year-olds struggle the most with suicidal thoughts. Note also that porn usage is basically flat among teens. If parents believe that they don’t need to be leaning into heavy-duty conversations about sexuality and suicide until their teens have their permit, they’ve waited far too long. Kids are exposed to porn and are struggling with mental health at startling young ages.

There is no small encouragement here that rates of depression and suicidal thoughts are more than half for committed Christians. When we ground ourselves in the truth of the gospel and root ourselves in the Word and prayer, there is a real impact on mental health.

The world looks at pastors and biblical counselors and shakes their collective head at our naivete in encouraging those struggling with depression to read the Bible, pray, and gather in worship and community. We live in a pharmacological age, where we think the primary solution for mental health is found in labs. A good pastor and biblical counselor doesn’t deny that there may be a physiological component to mental health that may require medication, but insists that there is always a spiritual dimension to mental health. To be clear, there are certainly cases where medication is helpful, but it is always the case that we ought to press into spiritual answers remedies.

Finally, it is important to note that while our teens are battling pornography better than the world, their sexual activity in relationships is no better (it’s slightly worse!). We ought to be reminded that merely knowing something is wrong does little to change our behavior. How can we speak to our teens’ hearts better in this matter and shape their affections?

On Social Media:

Teens in the US spend an average of 7 hours and 35 minutes online daily.
65% of teens say that social media improves their life satisfaction.
Depression rates for heavy internet users (10+ hours daily) is 20% higher than light internet users (below 4 hours daily).
Suicidal thoughts are 28% higher for heavy internet users than for light internet users.

It’s startling to me that 65% of teens say that social media improves their life satisfaction when study after study tells us of the significant negative mental health impact of social media. Adults need to recognize that those adverse impacts are even worse for teens and model healthy behavior. In addition, we need to be more proactive in creating healthy boundaries for our teens.

On Sexuality:

30% of teens believe that marriage should be exclusively between a man and a woman.
36% of Christian teens believe that marriage should be exclusively between a man and a woman.

It isn’t surprising that so few teens believe in a traditional understanding of marriage, but it is a bit sobering that so few Christians have a conventional view of marriage. We should never assume that our teens are absorbing a biblical worldview. We need to have proactive and biblically saturated conversations about worldview with our kids from a young age.

On the Meaning of Life:

45% of Christian teens say that their family is the most important influence on the meaning of life.
8% of Christian teens say that the Bible or pastors are the most important influence on the meaning of life.

It’s encouraging that Christian teens say that their parents influence them more than their non-Christian peers. If you are a parent, your teen likely still listens to you more than their friends (even though they might not act like it). More discouraging is just how low our teens’ view of the Bible is. Very few view the Bible as the ultimate authority in their lives. It’s unsurprising, then, that they would read the Bible so infrequently.

Conclusions:

More than anything, I hope that you read these findings with sympathy and care for Generation Z. They are growing up in a confusing time with massive challenges. There are so many reasons to be grateful for the technological innovation of the past twenty years. The opportunities for the spread of the gospel and communication across the globe cannot be understated.

For those of us whose first exposure to porn was through magazines and not the internet and whose identity was shaped by face-to-face social interactions and not social media we ought to be less critical and more supportive of this generation. May we come alongside in prayer, in relationship, and in service that God might grab hold of many struggling hearts for his glory and their good.

And finally, let us be hopeful. In every generation, the path of discipleship is costly and difficult. And yet, God’s ways are the best ways and he pursues us no matter the cultural and individual obstacles.