The More, the Merrier?
This year, we’ve been unpacking seven soundbites to teach your kids before (or after) they enter the social media world. These short declarations are like landmarks- helping your kids stay oriented to God’s love and purpose for them in the digital world:
01 / Identity Anchor your identity outside the digital world.
02 / Purpose Your digital spaces have purpose—like rooms in a house.
03 / Capacity Receive the gift of limits.
04 / Boundaries Your story is worth protecting.
05 / Engagement In a world that craves the spotlight, be a lantern.
06 / Smoke Detectors When things get smoky, head for the exits.
07 / Exit Routes Go big...or go home.
If you’re just jumping in, we’re on 03 / Capacity: Receive the gift of limits. I’ll be honest…this one’s a doozy…a little tender for me, and I’m guessing it might be for you, too. As parents, it can be painful and scary to watch our kids to work out their friendships. It’s NOT easy helping our kids search for a few good friends in a world that constantly tells them they should have hundreds. Travel back in time with me…
By the time our oldest daughter turned seven, I had six years of oversized-Pinterest-inspired-birthday-bashes under my belt…and I was exhausted. I came up with a plan: when my kids turned seven, we would limit their guest list to seven friends.
Brilliant mom-hack, right? But maybe you’ve already guessed what came next…we quickly learned that limiting your guest list can accidentally activate all kinds of social dynamics—hurt feelings, FOMO, power plays, and even bullying. Within 24 hours, moms were involved, names were called and pivots were made. We quickly abandoned our limit-of-seven policy.
As a parent, I was so caught off guard by the drama—I wanted my daughter to be the hands, feet and opens arms of Christ…not a mean girl! For the next several years, I took this as a personal challenge to champion open-door friendship, with phrases like The more, the merrier…Cast your nets wide…and Always room at the table for one more. And as I’ve worked with families navigating the digital world—this concept has grown even closer to my heart. In a world plagued with loneliness and isolation, it’s critically important to help our kids learn to be more inclusive, courageous, and kind.
But even as I celebrate the heart and spirit of this mission, I’ve found it can accidentally overshadow a message that is critical for our kids’ health and flourishing: And God gave you limits.
Recognizing limits does not come naturally when we’re swimming in sea of big numbers. Test scores. Sports stats. Social media followers. Likes. Views. Streaks. Two dozen instant comments on my post? Hooray! A reel that goes viral? Even better!! A handful of new people requesting to follow me? Sure! Always room at the table… Without someone helping us pump the brakes, it’s easy to assume that in social media, as in life, more means merrier.
But lately I’ve been fascinated by the work of British social anthropologist, Robin Dunbar, who did research in the 1990’s to explore how many relationships humans can actually “keep up” with before we pop. He was especially interested in identifying "the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar.” His finding? Somewhere around 150.
History tells a similar story. If you look back through the centuries and across cultures--tribes of people grow to a size of about 150 people before they tend to split. Without common rules or laws to hold people together, humans are limited in how many relationships we can sustain before we start to break apart. Take a look:
150 // Average population in an English village
150 // Size of a Roman centurion...and a modern infantry company
153.5 // Average exchange of Christmas cards in the UK per network
141 // Average number of wedding guests according to The Knot
It turns out, we have a social capacity. And while we tend to feel guilty or ashamed when we can’t keep up with our scads of Facebook friends in a deep or meaningful way—God does not see our social capacity as sin. Instead, our limits are actually a part of God’s original act of making us, which he called “good.”*
So. While we raise our kids to have open arms, let’s also help them recognize they were not created for high speed, supersized, artificial metrics. Jesus didn’t ask us to feed 5,000 people—he just asked us to bring our loaves and fish. To do small things with great love. To define our success not by our quantity of friends, but the depth of our love for them.
Giving our kids permission to create safe, healthy friendships with a smaller group of people doesn’t take away their capacity to love generously, to befriend the outcast, to seek the lost. It gives them permission to develop the deep relationships they’ll need to anchor them through the storms of life…and this is the antidote they need most to fight the epidemic of loneliness and shallow social media connections.
xo, kb
1 //
There is so much more to learn about the good news and theology of human limits, and I am LOVING learning through the book *You’re Only Human, by Kelly Kapic. It’s like oxygen to this busy-mama’s soul. Grab yourself a copy and see what you think! (It’s a little heady—more for adults than kids.)
2 //
If you want something you can listen to with your teens/tweens, I absolutely loved this podcast from Morgan Harper Nichols: I Have to Tell You About the Potato Account. If you aren’t familiar with Morgan, she’s an autistic artist and poet who uses social media to offer encouragement and empathy. When you run across her posts, you can’t help but pause and take a breath. In this podcast, Morgan shares openly about the struggle of being immersed in a world of social media numbers, and a fun practical experiment she’s doing to keep her grounded.
3 //
Need something even more simple? Pop Josh Wilson’s Dream Small on your playlist and use it as a way to spark conversation with your kids about big numbers, small numbers…and how God might view them differently than we think. Enjoy!!