Dera’s mother steps out of her room and heads toward her daughter’s door to hurry her up for church, but suddenly stops in shock.
There stands 16-year-old Dera in front of her phone this Sunday morning in Karu, Abuja, carefully adjusting her hair and smiling at the camera.
“Hi guys, come with me as I get ready for church,” she says, fully focused, recording a “get ready with me” video for her TikTok followers.
“Dera! Don’t you know we are late?” her mother barks. “Your dad will soon come downstairs to start the car.”
“Oh oh… Mummy, you just spoiled my video!” Dera replies, quickly trying to end the recording. Her face shows clear frustration, unhappy that her moment has been interrupted.
As her mother, a deaconess at a Gospel Assembly Church of God branch in Abuja, stands there staring at her daughter in disbelief, she wonders quietly within herself where things began to change: “Where did I miss it while raising Dera?”
About 45 kilometers away, in Kagini, a satellite town in Abuja, Mallam Yusuf Danjuma, a devout Muslim, is having the same thoughts about his teenage children.
“Sometimes I feel fed up with the way these children live their lives on the internet. During prayers, I catch him either scrolling through Facebook or playing games while the sermon is going on in the mosque,” he says, shaking his head, “It is really a big battle.”
“I am trying to teach my children that the ‘fear of God’ is the beginning of wisdom, but their phones are whispering that ‘trending’ is the beginning of relevance,’” adds Ngozi Samuel, an Abuja-based mother of four.
In today’s social media age, parenting has taken a new and challenging turn. For many parents, raising children “in the way of the Lord” now competes with the pressures of staying visible and relevant online.
This shift represents a painful loss of traditional authority for many parents. “In my time, you listened to your parents and followed whatever they said. But now? These children will argue almost everything, with whatever nonsense they’ve heard from a TikTok or Instagram influencer somewhere,” says Mrs. Samuel.
Still, many admit the smartphones and social media are a necessity for the kids’ competitiveness in a digital-or-nothing world.
According to the National Bureau of Statistics as of 2023, Nigeria had 226,161,713 internet subscribers, with about 47.8 million active social media users.
Hook by design
But psychologists and digital ethicists argue that social media algorithms are intentionally designed to keep users hooked for profit, even at the expense of mental and spiritual wellbeing.
Tristan Harris, a Google design ethicist and co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, compares social media platforms to gambling slot machines designed to use unpredictable rewards to keep users pulling the lever. In the same way, apps use notifications, algorithmic recommendations, and endless scrolling to keep users returning for more engagement at the expense of their spiritual and mental health.
“…apps and websites hijack people’s minds by inducing a 1% chance you could be missing something important,” he wrote in a Medium article titled “How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds.. “If I convince you that I’m a channel for important information, messages, friendships, or potential sexual opportunities; it will be hard for you to turn me off, unsubscribe or remove your account because (aha, I win) you might miss something important.”
Beyond mental health concerns such as low self-esteem, anxiety, studies show that social media addiction is linked to reduced spirituality and lower productivity.
A January 2026 study published in Journal of Psychology and Theology with the title Religion and Social Media Use: Protective Factors for Youth Well-Being in the Digital Age, researchers, Laura Upenieks and Terrence D. Hill found that “an additional hour of reported social media use causes lower levels of human flourishing.”
The study, which involved 4,500 people aged 13-25 from the United States, further found that “identifying as religious or spiritual buffers against the adverse psychological consequences of social media use.”
This conclusion validates the concerns of parents who feel their children’s spiritual and emotional grounding is being gradually replaced by online culture.
Still, some teenagers argue otherwise, insisting the phones and social media help them get closer to God.
“I think our parents worry too much,” says 20-year-old Priscilla Imaben with a grin. “To them, TikTok is just ‘noise,’ but to me, it’s where my community lives. I get to learn lots of good things there, even morals that my parents forget to teach me at home. I just feel they should just let us be, we can take care of ourselves online.”
A difficult balance
Some parents are now turning to what they call “digital integration” to create a difficult balance.
“I had to open a TikTok account,” says Mr. Alex Okezie, father of a 15 and 17-year-old in Lokoja. “I don’t post, but I follow them. If I see a questionable trend, I don’t shout. We discuss it during dinner as a family.”
Tunde Alade, a digital safety consultant, describes this approach as moving from “policing” to “partnership.” He said instead of trying to control their children’s digital life, parents can help them curate their feed, observe the “phone-free altar” during religious activities and a phone fast where necessary, or introduce “focus modes” and parental control apps to block social media during study hours.
This idea is to create boundaries around technology use—keeping digital tools available for education while limiting its distractions during sacred and family times.
Back in Karu, Dera set the phone aside to hasten her preparation for the service. While this felt like a small victory for her mom, the broader reality remains that parents cannot completely shield their children from the inevitable march of technology.
“The world has changed, this is our own world now, not theirs. So our parents have to come to terms with it and be comfortable with living in our world,” Dera says, clipping her phone into her handbag as the notification sounds keep buzzing.