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Parents struggling to police their kids’ screen-seeking habits—and who aren’t proud of their own—may find comfort in a new survey from the Pew Research Center of parents of kids 12 and younger, which finds it's tough and confusing for everybody.
The results repeatedly show that respondents claim to allow tech use by their preteens, yet their stated values do not quite align with their own actions. For example, 23% of parents in the survey say their 12-and-younger children have their own smartphone (Pew didn’t ask if they were child-optimized models), with the figure increasing to 57% for 11- and 12-year-olds.
However, 68% of parents also say that kids should be at least 12 before they get their own smartphones, while 46% think smartphones do more harm than good for kids 12 and younger.
(Credit: Pew Research Center)The dominant reason for parents to give a pre-teen a smartphone: staying in touch with them, identified by 92% of respondents. The primary reason parents cited for not doing that: their children being exposed to inappropriate online content, at 88%.
(Feature phones offer a way to allow the first use but not the second, but they are an endangered species in the US market, not to mention cringe in the eyes of kids.)
(Credit: Pew Research Center)Phones, however, only place third in Pew’s list of devices that parents report 12-and-under kids ever using or interacting with. The original electronic babysitter, TV, tops that chart at 90%, followed by tablets at 68%, phones at 61%, “gaming devices” at 50%, desktop and laptop computers at 39%, smart speakers at 37%, smartwatches at 11%, and AI chatbots at just 8%.
Considering all of the cases in which AI chatbots have wound up amplifying mental-health issues for their users, children in particular, that last number still looks uncomfortably high.
(Credit: Pew Research Center)Social media gets much smaller usage in Pew’s findings, aside from YouTube, which 85% of parents say is at least occasional viewing for the kids; 51% say it is an everyday thing. Most parents have viewed YouTube with their kids, with 74% saying they have ever done that with a 12-or-younger child, and 95% of parents of kids 2 and younger saying that.
No other platform comes close, with TikTok’s 15% share for occasional viewing by 12-and-younger kids beating Snapchat (8%) and Instagram and Facebook (5% each).
A 2013 US law called the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) sets strict privacy limits around how sites and apps can collect and use data from under-13 users. That has led many sites to limit the features available to those users or to block them if detected, which in turn has led many children in the COPPA demographic to exploit various workarounds, but Pew’s survey did not ask about that.
In terms of overall limits on screen time, the Pew survey finds that many parents feel inadequate, with 42% saying they feel they could be doing better, versus 33% who think they are stricter than other parents. The same fraction of parents think their kids spend too much time on smartphones.
And while 86% of parents reported having screen time rules–which they can enforce via software such as Apple’s Screen Time, Google’s Family Link, or third-party parental-control software–a much smaller fraction, 55%, said they stick to them most of the time.
Maybe because children often find ways to circumvent those restraints, 67% of respondents want tech companies to do more to set limits. They're slightly less eager to have the government step in; 55% want lawmakers to do more. Some of those attempts, notably Mississippi’s move to require social platforms to verify the ages of all new users, have led some sites to block entire states.
Finally, the parents who answered Pew’s questions know that they, too, struggle with screen time: 65% say they spend too much time on their phones, and 47% say that of social media. Speaking as a parent and a technology journalist: it me.
Pew put together this study by surveying a nationally representative sample of 3,054 parents with 12-and-under kids from May 13 to 26. That Washington-based nonprofit pulled those respondents from two larger pools recruited randomly, its American Trends Panel and the research firm SSRS’s Opinion Panel, with incentives for responding ranging from $5 to $15.