Are Social Media Algorithms Raising Our Children

Answering the question honestly

The title is a provocation, so let’s answer it plainly and not overstate.

An algorithm is not a parent. It doesn’t love your child, know your child, discipline, comfort, or teach them who they are. It cannot raise anyone, and any claim that it “is raising” your child is rhetoric, not fact.

And here’s the honest limit on the other side: what’s documented is that these systems optimize for engagement, and that long-horizon optimization creates an incentive to shift preferences — a concern serious researchers have argued formally and demonstrated in simulation. What is not established is that real platforms have measurably reprogrammed real children. (See: How Algorithms Shape What Your Child Wants for the full, carefully-bounded version.)

So we won’t tell you the algorithm is raising your child. We’ll tell you something truer and more uncomfortable: it is forming them, in the hours nobody else claimed — and formation is most of what raising is.

The part that’s actually true

Strip out the overstatement and a real thing remains.

Formation is mostly about hours and repetition. A child becomes what they’re repeatedly exposed to — what’s normal, what’s admired, what’s wanted, what gets attention. That’s how homes form children too: not by one big talk, but by ten thousand ordinary moments.

The feed is now present in an enormous number of those moments. And it is not neutral in them — it’s optimized, showing your child what holds attention, over and over, hours a day.

So the real claim is arithmetic, not conspiracy: whoever is present in the most formative hours is doing the most forming. For a lot of children, that’s now a feed — not because anyone chose it, but because those hours were unassigned and something walked into them.

That’s not an accusation. It’s subtraction. And it points at the fix.

Who’s forming the desires?

Here’s the sharpest version of the question, and it’s the one that matters.

Your child wants things. Some of those wants came from you, from your church, from their own nature. Some of them came from somewhere else — a product, a look, a life, a body they never encountered and never asked about.

Where did those come from?

“The lust of the eyes” is how Scripture names an appetite trained by looking (1 John 2:16). John had the mechanism two thousand years before the feed: wanting is teachable, and things you look at do the teaching. The algorithm didn’t invent this. It industrialized it — scaled the training of desire to hours a day, optimized, personalized.

So: is an algorithm forming your child’s wants? In the hours you’ve left unclaimed — yes, to a real degree. Not raising them. Forming them. And a parent can notice that without believing anything conspiratorial.

How a home takes the role back

Not by defeating the algorithm — you won’t. By reclaiming the hours and the formation that happens in them.

Reclaim the default hour. This is the whole ballgame. The feed forms your child in unassigned time. Assign it. Decide what happens in the hours nobody was directing, and the algorithm simply doesn’t get them. (See: What Screen Time Crowds Out and Family Media Plan for Christian Homes.)

Be present in the formative moments. Formation is repetition and presence. The dinner table, the car, the ordinary conversation — those are formative hours, and a parent in them is doing the thing an algorithm can’t. (See: How to Build an Apostolic Home That Disciples.)

Ask what they’re wanting, not just what they’re watching. “What do you want lately that you didn’t want last year? Where do you think that came from?” That question does formation work — it teaches a child to notice their own desires being trained, which is a skill a feed can’t give and can’t take.

Teach the design. A child who understands the feed is optimizing for time, not for their good, is harder to form unawares. Knowledge is a kind of armor here.

Model reclaimed hours. Your child learns what a governed relationship with a phone looks like by watching one. If they’ve never seen an adult put it down, they have no picture of the alternative. (See: Why Parents Must Model Digital Self-Control.)

Where this lands

This is, underneath, a very old question wearing new equipment.

“Train up a child in the way he should go, And when he is old he will not depart from it.”

Proverbs 22:6

The word train — chanak — means to dedicate, to initiate: to set a child apart for a purpose and start them down a road on purpose. It assumes someone is doing the forming. Scripture’s question was never whether a child gets formed. It’s by whom, and toward what.

For most of history the honest rivals for that role were the street, bad company, the surrounding culture. Today one of the rivals is a system optimized to hold attention and indifferent to where your child ends up. It’s a formidable rival precisely because it’s in so many of the hours.

“And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind…”

Romans 12:2

Conformed is a passive verb — it happens to you, in the hours you don’t guard. Transformed is what a deliberate home does instead. Both are formation. The only question is which one is getting your child’s hours.

An algorithm cannot raise your child. But it will form them in every hour a home leaves open — so the answer to the title is finally in your hands, and it always was.

Do this

1. Reclaim one unassigned hour. Decide what it’s for. That’s where the formation is.
2. Be present in one formative moment you’ve been outsourcing — dinner, the car.
3. Ask what they’re wanting, not just watching. Teach them to notice.
4. Teach the design — the feed optimizes for time, not their good.
5. Model a governed phone. They learn the alternative by seeing it.

Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.