The Smartphones Have Not Defeated Us. Yet.

Parents have a way to bring back childhood, but we have to act together to make it work.

- Jonathan Haidt, Will Johnson and Zach Rausch

Since the dawn of the television age, parents have struggled to limit or guide their children's screen time.

But with the arrival of smartphones that can—and do—go everywhere and with social media apps that teenagers now use for an average of five hours every day, many parents feel a sense of resignation. The struggle has been lost. Parents who try to delay giving a smartphone until high school or social media until 16 know that they'll face the plaintive cry from their children: "But I'm the only one!"

To better understand the tensions over technology playing out in American families, we worked with The Harris Poll to conduct two surveys. As we reported in 2024, our survey of 1,006 members of Gen Z found that many young people feel trapped—tethered to digital products like TikTok and Snapchat. Nearly half of all participants expressed regret about having access to many of the most popular social media platforms.

Here we present the second part of our investigation: a nationally representative survey of 1,013 parents who have children under 18. The overall picture isn't any better. We find widespread feelings of entrapment and regret. Many parents gave their children smartphones and social media access early in their lives—yet many wish that social media had never been invented, and overwhelmingly they support new social norms and policies that would protect children from online harms.

In our survey, 55 per cent report that their children began to use a smartphone as a primary user by the age of 12, and 61 per cent say the same for a tablet.