For all parents and pastors, I highly recommend Jim Steyer’s book Talking Back to Facebook: The CommonSense Guide to Raising Kids in the Digital Age. For the sake of our kids, we need to model and teach responsible, informed use of digital and social media. We can’t simply avoid it, but we mustn’t embrace it uncritically either. Steyer’s book, while not alarmist, is helpfully critical of some of the recent advances in digital and online technology. He identifies and explores three key areas of concern: Relationships, Attention / Addiction, and Privacy. And he gives some straightforward (but not simplistic) tips for guiding kids of various ages (0-2, 3-4, 5-6, 7-8, 9-10, 11-12, 13-15) as they grow up in this new technological age.
NB The book isn’t just about Facebook; but Steyer has used Facebook in the title because, in his words, Facebook is the “giant, eight-hundred-pound gorilla of social media” and as such is “the most potent symbol of the digital revolution” (p. 6).
Here’s a video overview:
H/T Steve Kryger.