“He is always on his phone! ”
“She checks her phone first thing every morning.”
“He even sleeps with his phone clutched in his hands.”
“I have a better chance of getting through her if I text her than talk to her in person.”
These are real remarks from real parents of teenagers. If you are a parent of a teen, it is likely that you yourself have said this atleast once in your parenting life.
So why do teens love their phones so much? What is in their phones? What do phones provide them with, physically and emotionally? This post is going to explore some of these questions.
Though a phone is an inanimate object, it has the power to satisfy a variety of a teen’s needs.
What kind of needs, you ask?
- Connection: Less and less teens meet each other in person today, most connect with their friends on social media. 2023 data from the Pew Research Center show that 63% of US teens use TikTok, 60% use Snapchat and 59% are on Instagram. These numbers are substantial. This means that phones inevitably become one of the few places where your teen gets to meet their friends. Humans have an innate need to connect with members of their tribe. Unfortunately, in 2024, your teen’s tribe is mostly only e-available.
- Keep tabs on social circles: Instagram has functionally become similar to teen hangout spots from the pre-phone era. Social media is how your teen now gets to know what their friends are up to, who is taking pictures with who, who got invited to which party, or if their friends are staying loyal to them. It is their literal newsfeed.
- Privacy: Family members today can’t snoop on their teen’s text conversations with friends or crushes the way they used to be able to do. Remember how stressful landline conversations with our friends used to be? Mobile phones grant you a special kind of privacy from the watching eyes of parents and family.
- Validation: Internet algorithms are designed to feed your teen more of the content they like. For example, if your teen thinks that it is pointless to go to college and starts watching videos of college dropouts who became millionaires such as Mark Zuckerberg, their feed will soon be filled with more such videos which in turn will validate their feelings about skipping college.
- Cheap dopamine: I have written about this before. Mobile phones are full of cheap dopamine sources. In other words, a phone is a major source of instant gratification. For example, let’s take the situation of your teen wanting to befriend a classmate. In real life, friendships are built with time and with effort. But on their phone, all they need to do is press on the ‘send request’ button. Another example is entertainment. When your teen feels bored, Youtube and Netflix are just a click away.
- Avoidance: If your teen is looking to avoid difficult conversations, phones are the perfect ally. Don’t want to sort things out with your classmate? Block. Changed your mind about inviting your friend to your birthday party? Just un-invite (Yes, uninviting is a thing!).
- Escape from reality: Phones today at the click of a button can transport you to any part of the world. While this is wonderful in so many ways, it can also become an escape from confronting reality. A phone can quickly become a way for your teen to seek refuge constantly instead of building resilience.
- Peer approval: As adults, we do what our peers do e.g. our peers go to work so we go to work. Our teens also do what their peers do. And what do their peers do? Text to talk, click to shop and swipe to delete.
- An attractive fidget spinner: Phones act as a great (albeit often unhealthy) substitute for a fidget spinner. Teens are fidgety and phones allow them to fight boredom and direct their fidgety-ness to someplace else, in this case the internet.
- Calorie conservation: Being on our phones is time spent away from exercising, playing, being out in the sun or studying. Our bodies are designed to be partial to activities that help us conserve calories and phones allow your teen to be sedentary for long periods of time, thus preserving those calories.
There you go!I hope this post helped shed some light to the great mysterious question that every parent of a teenager today wants to find out from their teen – “What are you always doing on your phone?!”
The question that you may be now left with:
“Okay, I get it. I understand why my teen loves his phone so much. I understand why my daughter can’t bear to part with her phone even for a few minutes. But how can I fix this problem?”
Unhealthy phone use is a complex problem, its solutions therefore need to be carefully and thoughtfully designed. Unfortunately, there is no magic pill that will instantly fix your teen’s relationship with their screen. It is going to take time.
As a starting point, you may benefit from helping your teen get their sleep, diet and attention issues in order. We will keep writing about this topic in future posts too, so keep an eye out. Feel free to also check out the weekly tips we share on Linkedin.
The art that we need to learn as parents is to help our teens leverage the benefits of having a phone, e.g. using Maps if they need help with directions, while not getting pulled into the disadvantages e.g. spending excessive time on social media.
You (and your teen) will both get there, stay hopeful.
