(CN) — As U.S. lawmakers weigh whether to ban popular social media app TikTok and dozens of states have sued social media companies over how kids use the platforms, a study from Pew Research Center published Monday delved into how much time teens and parents are spending on their devices.
Pew surveyed 1,453 U.S. teenagers between 13 and 17 years old and their parents between Sept. 26 and Oct. 26, 2023, and found that while many teenagers spent a good chunk of their time glued to their cell phones, so did their parents.
Of the teens surveyed, 38% said they spent too much time on their phones, while 47% of parents said the same. Conversely, just 5% of parents say they spent too little time on their cell phones, and 45% believed they spent the right amount of time on their phones.
"I think our data highlights that this is not just a teen issue, it's a family issue," said Colleen McClain, one of the lead researchers of the study.
More teens said they thought the benefits of smartphones outweighed the harms, according to the study. The majority of teens said they thought smartphones made it easier for people their age to pursue hobbies and close to half said the devices made it easier for kids to do well in school.
Girls ages 13 and 14 were more likely than older teen girls and teen boys to say that the harms of teens' smartphone use outweighed the benefits.
In the same way that teens are split on whether smartphones do more harm than good, teens had mixed opinions when it came to whether smartphones make it easier for teens to develop healthy friendships. Roughly 40% of teens said their phones made it easier for them to develop healthy friendships, while 31% each say the devices make it harder or neither easier nor harder.
Despite this, 42% of teens said smartphones make it more difficult to learn good social skills.
"Many teens are saying that they feel happy and peaceful when they don't have their phone," McClain said. "At the same time, not everything about phone uses one size fits all. So I think a key takeaway from our findings is that these issues are not monolithic. So just as we see, some teens saying that they are happy and peaceful when they don't have their phones, we also [see] smaller shares, but still shares and they're anxious or lonely when they don't have their phone with them."
Pew conducted a similar study in 2022 that looked at teens' emotions about social media use and found their experiences ran the emotional gamut from anxiety to excitement.
In the 2022 study, researchers looked at changes in teenagers' social media usage since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, and talked to a focus group of teens about how they increased their interactions with various platforms.
"In the report we do see some quotes from teen girls and teen boys who are talking about using social media more, since the beginning of the pandemic," McClain said. "We see qualitative evidence to some of those effects of the pandemic, but we can't kind of back out and make broader conclusions about teens as a whole."
McClain noted that researchers observed patterns between the 2022 and 2024 studies — though they couldn't be compared "apples to apples" — including in gender differences.
"For example, girls are more likely than boys to say they spend too much time on social media or on their smartphones," McClain said. "At the same time, we see more girls than boys expressing loneliness when they do not have their phone with them."
Responses from parents varied on how they addressed their kids' screen time, particularly because they, too, reported being distracted by their phone when trying to talk to their kids.
"We asked the parents, for example, are you setting limits on the amount of time your teen can be on their phone? About half were doing so, half were not," McClain said. "Forty-three percent of parents said managing the amount of time their teen is on their phone is hard. And so some parents are really facing an uphill battle here."
McClain said the biggest takeaway from the study is that there's not one way to describe teenage cellphone use.
"It's a really important time to be bringing teens' and parents' voices into the conversation," she said.
"There's a lot of conversation about what parents should do, what tech companies should do about teens using social media [and] teens being on their phones. And I think all of this really paints a really nuanced picture of how screens are impacting teens' and their parents' lives."
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