Teens’ and parents’ phone habits vexing

Talking about Generation Z without talking about smartphones is impossible. The interconnectedness between teen and device has become the defining question about the generation after the millennials.

But a new Pew Research Center study suggests that the smartphone habits of those teens’ parents can be worrisome too.

Take the dinner table — the cliched scene where a parent tries to have a conversation with their cellphonewielding teen, headphones on and distracted. Seventytwo percent of parents feel their teens are often or sometimes distracted by their phones while trying to have a conversation. But when Pew asked teens the same question about their parents, 51 percent of them said they believe their parents are either often or sometimes distracted by their phones during reallife conversations.

In some cases, teens might be a little better at managing their own distraction than their parents are. Fifteen percent of parents told Pew that they are often distracted at work because of their phones. Just 8 percent of teens said the same about themselves at school. And similar numbers of teens (18 percent) and parents

(20 percent) report that they feel obligated to respond immediately to messages from others.

For a long time, the conversation about teens and their phones has focused almost exclusively on concerns about addiction. The Pew study does show that many teens have an intense bond with their devices: Fortytwo percent of teens said they felt “anxious” without their phones. But teens have also demonstrated with increasing frequency that their relationship to their phones is often neither wholly good nor wholly bad.

For instance, the Parkland, Fla., students responded to the massacre at their high school in February by using their phones to broadcast what was happening to the rest of the world and check up on one another.

Pew surveyed 1,058 parents with at least one teen aged 13 to 17, and 743 teens. The margin of

error for those samples was plus or minus 5 percentage points for the teens and 4.5 percentage points for the parents.

The results also show some of the generational gaps you’d expect to see comparing these two groups’ attitudes toward their smartphone usage.

Yet the gaps aren’t quite as big as you’d expect. For instance, 54 percent of teens, according to Pew, believe they spend too much time on their phones. Thirty-six percent of parents feel the same about themselves. Seventy-two percent of teens often or sometimes check their phone messages right after waking up in the morning. Fifty-seven percent of parents do the same.

Meanwhile, 52 percent of teens have reported cutting back on the time they spend on their phones; 57 percent say the same about social media, and 58 percent about video games.