Survey: more than 50% of US teens say they are trying to reduce phone, social media, and video game use; 57% of parents say they restrict children's screen time
Jingjing Jiang / Pew Research Center :
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2018 Pew survey is the baseline for a question the Center keeps re-asking: whether teens themselves see their screen habits as a problem. The answer here — a majority trying to cut back on phones, social media, and games, with 57% of parents imposing limits — set up the follow-up waves that came after.
The pattern held rather than faded: by 2024, 38% of teens still said they spent too much time on their phones, and by [[a:884874|2025, the share saying social media harms people their age had climbed from 32% in 2022 to 48%]]. The same season's data already showed where attention was migrating — only 15% of social-media-using teens were on Facebook, down from 68% in 2012 — so 'reducing use' was never uniform across platforms.
First-order effects
- Teens and parents are acting on their own concerns in parallel: a majority of teens report self-restriction while 57% of parents enforce it, making household rules — not just individual willpower — the immediate battleground over device time.
Second-order effects
- Platforms competing for teen attention face a demand-side headwind: with Facebook already collapsed to 15% of teen social media users, any network seen as a time sink risks the same flight, pushing rivals to differentiate on how time on the product feels rather than how much of it they capture.
Third-order effects
- If the trajectory from this survey through the 2024 and 2025 waves holds — persistent excess-use reports hardening into majority-level harm perceptions — teen screen time stays a standing policy and product-design issue, with girls' consistently more negative experiences shaping where scrutiny lands first.
The trend: Teen ambivalence about screens has proven durable across seven years of Pew waves, converting from a self-help concern in 2018 into a perceived-harm consensus that keeps parental controls and platform accountability on the agenda.