Young children and teenagers are spending more and more time online — especially playing games and interacting on social media platforms such as TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram.

• By age two, most kids are spending about five hours per day on a screen.
• Five- to eight-year-old kids spend about five hours a day online.
• Most teenagers use social media and have a smartphone, and almost 50% say they’re online almost constantly, based on Pew Research Center’s fall 2024 survey of teens in the United States ages 13 to 17.
• Across the five social media platforms of YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook, one-third of teens use at least one of these almost constantly.
• Eighty-five percent of teens say they play video games, and about four in 10 play games every day.

Too Much Virtual Time and Not Enough Family Time Creates Detached Kids

If kids spend too much time playing video games and on social media and not enough time building close relationships with their family members, they can become detached and lonely. This leads to anxiety and depression, and as previously reported in The Washington Stand, the rate of suicide has increased — even for kids as young as 11 years old.

Stella Morabito, senior contributor at The Federalist and author of “The Weaponization of Loneliness,” recently shared her findings with Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on “Washington Watch.” As she explained, “Children in particular are highly suggestible, but even more so if they don’t have strong bonds of family, religious faith, and good friendships.” If they don’t have strong bonds, what they find online has a strong effect on them, desensitizing them to gore, violence, and pornography. And, tragically, sometimes these kids end up acting out what they experience online.

Mary Szoch, FRC’s director of the Center for Human Dignity, agrees that it’s crucial for parents to be vigilant and protect their children from those seeking to harm them online. “There are some things that no one should ever see — especially children,” she told The Washington Stand. “As parents, we must do everything in our power to ensure that our children’s minds are not polluted with garbage, violence, and gore. Part of this work includes doing everything possible to shut down the porn industry and internet websites that are meant to exploit children. Once the mind has been exposed to certain images, it is impossible for the damage to be undone. We should all work together to stop this evil before it starts.”

Violent Terrorist Groups Are Targeting Detached Kids at an Alarming Rate

During his interview with Morabito, Perkins explained that detached kids find an alternative community online. He became alarmed by a recent Associated Press story that told about a 12-year-old French boy who was radicalized online and became an Islamist extremist. He was convicted on two terror-related charges last August. While his mother thought he was simply playing video games and doing homework, the boy was actually learning how to kill and watching videos of decapitation and torture so horrific they made even experienced French court officials look away. As the prosecutor said, “I have seen some horrible things in my career, but this goes beyond all comprehension.”

The boy became exposed to this extreme gore, violence, and hate when he researched Islam after his aunt gave him a Quran. As The Independent details, “From there, more searching, automated algorithms that steer users’ online experiences and the boy’s curiosity ultimately led him to encrypted chats and ultraviolent propaganda pumped out by Islamic State militants and other extremist groups who are worming their way via apps, video gaming, and social media into the minds of the very young.”

The radicalization process often starts with violent pornography or gore. Then the kids watch murder videos from Mexican drug cartels and decapitations, throat-slitting, and torture by jihadists.

Devastatingly, the number of children who are becoming violent extremists has multiplied at a disturbing rate in Europe over just three years. The intelligence-sharing network of the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand security agencies has issued a warning, with Belgium calling the speed of radicalization “nothing short of meteoric.” In France, for example, prosecutors charged just two minors with terror-related preliminary charges in 2022. In 2023, they charged 15 minors, and in 2024, 19. Olivier Christen, France’s national anti-terrorism prosecutor, said this “demonstrates the strong effectiveness of the propaganda disseminated by terrorist organizations, which are quite good at targeting this age group.”

Parents Must Be Vigilant and Intentional about What They’re Teaching Children

As FRC’s Senior Fellow for Education Studies Meg Kilgannon explains, “This is a problem also of mass immigration from non-Western cultures. While France retains its vestiges of Christian civilization but fails to require immigrants to assimilate to French culture, it’s easy to imagine immigrant youth feeling alone, isolated, or out of place. This makes them easy prey for exploitation by gangs or radicals who want to tear down society. Praying for our neighbors and with them has never been more important.”

This reiterates why it’s so important for parents to be vigilant and intentional about what we’re teaching our kids. FRC’s Senior Fellow for Biblical Worldview and Strategic Engagement Joseph Backholm told TWS, “The things we meditate on define us. The reason Christians are instructed to ‘take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ’ and to ‘be transformed by the renewing of our mind’ is because what happens between our ears determines what will happen in the rest of our lives.”

Backholm continued, “Satan understands this, which is why he tries to get us to think about anything other than the goodness of God and our reasonable response to what He has done for us. He’ll do that by making us busy, distracted, and addicted to any kind of media, but pornography is especially useful because it not only keeps us from doing what we were created to do, but feeds our appetites for the things that will destroy us.”

Let us set an example for our children by daily reading God’s word, setting our minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for if we “train up a child in the way he should go, even when he is old he will not depart from it.”