The State of Childhood in the U.S.
Over recent years, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and others have increasingly underscored the developmental value of children spending less time on their devices and more time playing outside, unsupervised, with their friends. The Institute for Family Studies set out to examine how much these insights have penetrated mainstream parental practices in the U.S. thus far. In our recent survey of nearly 24,000 U.S. parents — caring for 40,000 children — we found that American kids continue to spend enormous amounts of time online with very few restrictions, while experiencing very strict limits on their activities in the real world. In other words, the key phenomenon Haidt observed in The Anxious Generation — “overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world” — remains widely true for most children and teens.
- American kids spend a lot of time online. Even parents who would describe their parenting style as low tech and who encourage free-range play allow their three-year-old children, on average, 3.5 hours per week of time on internet-enabled devices. Three-year-old children of parents who encourage tech average 6 hours per week using such devices.
- American kids get their devices young with few serious restrictions. By the age of 11, smartphones become the primary medium for internet access among American kids, with over 60% having a smartphone. These phones generally have few parental restrictions placed on them. Meanwhile, nearly 50% of three-year-olds use a Tablet, iPad, or Kindle; and many of these children have few or no restrictions.
- American kids are generally not free to move around unsupervised. In fact, even by 17-years-old, about 60% of American kids are still not allowed to leave their neighborhood unsupervised.
- Social class shapes parenting in big ways. Parents with a graduate degree are more likely to establish screen time limits or phone drop-off rules for children over age 10 than less-educated parents; and parents with a graduate degree are also less likely to support the idea that 8 to 12-year-old kids should have more supervision.
Before presenting our analysis, we think it’s important to note: as with any large survey, some figures may vary slightly due to sampling limitations or differences in how respondents interpreted the questions.
Tech and Family Life
On average, American parents allow their three-year-old children 4.5 weekly hours of internet-connected device use. From there, the average weekly hours steadily increase with age. By the time their children are 17-years-old, American parents allow them almost 20 weekly hours of internet-connected device use. It should be noted that parents could have double-counted some device usage time: if a child was scrolling on their phone while streaming a show on a computer, we would count both the computer and the phone usage. However, we do not regard this as an error, since using multiple devices simultaneously would indeed be a more intense exposure to screens and online content.
Though the numbers remain high overall, we do find some substantial differences in weekly device use between parents who prioritize outdoor play and claim to be low-tech, and those who say they encourage the technology use of their kids. As the figure below shows, by the age of three, kids who grow up in a high-play/low-tech household are on internet-connected devices an average of 2.5 weekly hours less than their peers who are in high-tech households. That might not seem like much, but over the course of a year, that amounts to nearly 130 fewer hours online for three-year-olds. And while both groups steadily rise, the gap in hours used begins to further widen around age 13, and the widest gap is at 15, when kids in low-tech/high-play households are, on average, online eight fewer hours a week, which over the course of a year amounts to a difference of approximately 400 hours. In other words, in any given week, the differences are modest. But over time, they compound, becoming extremely meaningful.
Still, the numbers for both groups are remarkably high. In fact, 17-year-old kids in the low-tech/high-play group are online a weekly average of 15.7 hours, which amounts to more than 800 hours a year. Based on these numbers, they are online approximately five weeks a year; and kids in high-tech households, at the age of 17, are online an average of 6.5 weeks a year.
A large share of American kids at three-years-old are given internet-connected devices by their parents. Just shy of half of American three-year-olds in our sample (46%) have access to a tablet, iPad, or Kindle. More than 15% have access to a smartphone. Tablet access reaches a peak at age 6, when 60% of kids in our nationwide sample are using them, with gaming console and smartphone access rising steadily. At the age of 11, the hierarchy changes, with smartphones surpassing tablets in use and, a few years later, at the age of 13, gaming consoles become the second most dominant device used, followed by computers and laptops, which become the third most dominant device. By age 17, 90% of the children in our sample have a smartphone, 60% have a gaming console, and 50% have a laptop or computer.
Parental Controls
But what about parental controls? American children might have access to devices at young ages, but are parents closely monitoring and guarding their activity, such as by disabling internet access on a child’s device, or utilizing content filters? Not as much as one might hope.
Overall, we find that the peak of internet-disabled smartphone usage is at 4-years-old, and it steadily declines from there, with less than 10% of five-year-old kids using internet-disabled smartphones. Throughout the course of childhood and adolescence, a greater share of parents require passwords to make purchases on their child’s smartphone than implement content filters to increase the safety.
This may be unfortunate, but it is also not surprising. Child safety experts, like Chris McKenna of Protect Young Eyes, have analyzed how Big Tech companies like Apple and Google have made it needlessly challenging to implement parental controls. No doubt this problem is exacerbated by other factors, some as straightforward as parents who simply don’t believe their children need guardrails or don’t have the time to make the changes. Whatever the case, only a minority of parents in our sample across all child ages require content filters on their children’s smartphones. By 17-years-old, fewer than 20% of teenagers who use smartphones have parental content filters on their phone.
