What Parents Can Do To Cut Down On Teens’ Phone Use

If you spend any part of your day caring for children, chances are that you dedicate some portion of that time to managing their use of screens. In the case of teens, the screens in question are usually their own phones, site of the ever-shifting line between where a parent’s responsibility ends and a teen’s freedom begins.

A new study from the Pew Research Center sheds some light on what teens and parents believe about screen time — both their own and each other’s. One hopeful takeaway from the data is that teens and parents share some views of the challenges that screens present in our lives. We are all on the same boat, so to speak, when it comes to navigating these new waters. Parents today have a unique opportunity to shape the way that teens use their phones. In addition, experts say that the one thing parents control most — their own phone use — can be a powerful influence on teens’ relationship to technology.

The Pew researchers used a novel approach to collect data from parents and their teenage children, ages 13-17. They surveyed 1,453 teens and their parents in the fall of 2023.

“We asked [parents] a few questions about their own technology use, and then we asked them to think about one of their teens — if they had multiple teens, we randomly selected one — and then actually had them bring that teen to the computer so that the teen then could answer questions as well. So we’re able to pair responses from teens themselves with responses from their parents,” Colleen McClain, one of the lead researchers on the study, told HuffPost.

A sizeable number of teens feel that they spend too much time on their phones. Thirty-eight percent said that they think they’re on their phones too much. Interestingly, while a slim majority (51%) say they’re spending just about the right amount of time on their phones, 74% said they sometimes or often feel happy when they don’t have their phones, and 72% said they sometimes or often feel peaceful when they’re away from their phones.

However, 44% said they sometimes or often feel anxious when they do not have their phones with them.

What to make of this befuddling data? “We found that teens’ screen time and their phone use is really far from one-size-fits-all.”

While a majority of teens (70%) believe that, overall, the benefits of smart phones outweigh the harms, the numbers break down differently depending which benefits or harms you’re…