YOUNG AND MOBILE
It’s not in your head. American survey finds nearly 9 out of 10 teens has access to a cellphone,
SAN FRANCISCO— If it seems like every teenager you see has a smartphone glued to their hand, it’s not your imagination. Fully 73 per cent of American teens have access to one, a study by the Pew Research Center finds.
Add in the 15 per cent of teens who have a basic cellphone and 88 per cent of American teens ages 13 to 17 have access to a mobile phone of some sort.
Only 12 per cent of the teens told Pew they didn’t have a cellphone of any type.
Mobile phones and access to social media through them are a major part of teens’ lives today, said Amanda Lenhart, lead author on the report published Thursday.
The Pew survey of more than 1,000 teens found that 92 per cent of teens go online daily and 24 per cent say they are online “almost constantly.”
“It’s very easy to feel as though you are nearly constantly online when you have a buzzing, ringing, musicplaying connective device in your pocket 15 or more hours a day,” Lenhart said.
Amy Treadwell lives in Novato, Calif., and sees the pattern with her daughter’s friends. “I’ll have three girls in the back seat of my car and they’ve all got phones. They’re interacting, but not interacting,” she said.
Just 12 per cent of teens said they went online only once a day and a meagre 6 per cent said they went online weekly.
While the siren song of the Internet can feel like it pulls teens from family life, in some ways it also allows par- ents to connect with their children, said Nancy Costello in Ann Arbor, Mich.
Costello’s daughter got a smartphone when she turned 13. One upside has been the glimpse she gets into her daughter’s daily life.
“I can gauge where she is moodwise by what she posts or what she tweets,” said Costello, who made it a rule that she gets to follow her daughter on social media. “I’m guessing that I probably know more about my kid as a 14-year-old than my mother knew about me when I was that age.”
A media lawyer, Costello also uses her daughter and her friends as a way to understand what’s hot in social media. “Facebook is where baby boomers are going, but for people below 20, it’s not about Facebook, it’s others — Twitter and Instagram and Snapchat,” she said.
Flip phones are still popular, at least with some parents
Close to one-third of teens don’t have smartphones. The survey found that 30 per cent have a basic cellphone that doesn’t access the Internet.
While this group as a whole tends to come from lower-income families, one interesting anomaly was the high percentage of teens whose parents graduated from college who have only basic cellphones. Their numbers are comparable with teens whose parents had only graduated from high school or had some college, 16 per cent compared with 15 per cent and 12 per cent respectively.
“We would expect to see fewer teens with highly educated parents with just a basic phone, but we don’t. It does suggest a choice rather than economics at play for that group,” said Lenhart.
Almost all of these teens have access to a computer at home, so their families may see a smartphone as more a lifestyle choice than a need.
In San Francisco, Maureen Persico bought her son a $20 flip phone because she saw no reason to spend hundreds of dollars to buy him one that might be gone at any second. “For the longest time he’d forget his shoes if they weren’t on his feet,” she said.
He wasn’t very sanguine about the phone. In a city where cellphone theft is rampant, she told him to keep his phone in his pocket and never take it out on the bus. However, her son argued that the phone was so down market, “that no one would ever want to steal it,” she said.
Persico knows that some families have a philosophy of “the best of everything for my kid.” She doesn’t. “It’s like saying ‘Why don’t I give my kid a Lamborghini?’ “
Instead, she’s trying to teach her son moderation and the idea that he has to work to get fancy gadgets. “He’ll have to earn it,” she said.
The survey was conducted in English and Spanish with teens and their parents in the fall of 2014 and the spring of 2015. It was commissioned by the Pew Research Center, a non-partisan think-tank based in Washington D.C.