Reducing Smartphone Use Among Adolescents
- Rachel Kelly
- Jul 10
- 5 min read
Of all the topics that concern parents, teachers, and caretakers of teenagers right now, I have found that the most worrying is how to reduce their phone use. It’s an addictive world of obsessive scrolling out there, where young adults (aged 18–24) spend on average four hours, 36 minutes a day on their phones.
One parent I talked to spoke for many of us when she said, ‘I just want to smash their phones into a thousand pieces and flush them down the loo.’
But taking away your teenager’s phone or smashing it into a thousand pieces isn’t going to work or help. Even if we think about digital parental controls, I have found that they have been made so deliberately cumbersome and inaccessible by tech firms, that they are unusable for most parents. Even if we do figure out how to use them, teenagers will find a way around such controls, whether through back-up phones or by using VPNs (virtual private networks, which can hide who and where the users are), just as they find ways round age verification. They are almost certainly more tech-savvy than us.
However, don’t despair!
Some approaches do help, especially those that tap into teenage psychology and work with teenagers rather than against them. Therefore, in this blog I will go through two strategies which have worked for many parents.
First, the need for connection.
1) Connecting more with our teenagers ourselves
The best immunisation against using digital devices for social connection is a teenager who feels understood, communicated with, and connected to us. This can mean one-on-one time, ‘special days’ in which you plan something meaningful together, five-minute chats or prioritising quality moments, by which I mean focused and meaningful engagement.
To protect times when a more fulfilling connection is possible, we need to create digital-free zones in our homes and in our schedules, including holidays off grid (ideally) involving climbing, swimming, or any physical activity in which it’s impossible be on a phone. One parent told me her teenager was surprised by how relaxing she found such a digital detox, even though she had resisted the idea originally. ‘I think of it as “stealth health” holiday,’ the mother told me. ‘You subtly weave in digital-free times.’
Mealtimes, family times, evenings, and bedtimes are the most important periods to keep free of digital activities, both to create the space to provide the connection our children really need, and to slow down the obsession with phones. Put your own phone aside to encourage your teen to do the same.
Secondly, we need to think about a teenager's love of autonomy: reducing phone use needs to be their idea, not ours.
2) Appealing to their love of autonomy with cunning questions
We want to tap into the teenage desire for autonomy. Telling them what to do may be less effective than asking questions, so they figure things out themselves and take ownership of the problem. Ask exactly how much time they spend on social media. This is so simple, but effective.
Many teenagers are concerned about the time they spend on their phone, but haven’t actually totted up the hours. When they do, they can be quite shocked. One teenager who carried out this exercise said, "I realized I could have done so many other things – forged better connections with friends in person, quality time with my family, time spent doing more worthwhile things. I just hadn’t realized how many hours were involved."
A second question you could ask your teenager is, "How does social media make you feel?"
You could ask why they are drawn to social media in the first place. Is something else going on? Are they anxious, or being bullied, or looking to social media for answers about something? Or is it to distract from negative thoughts? Does it feel like they really are connecting with others, or more like they are performing? The likelihood is that the answers will be negative.
Digital intimacy does not deliver on its promise. In fact, it often makes things worse; psychologists have found increases in loneliness reported by 15- and 16-year-olds in most parts of the world. The data often seem to show these problems taking a turn for the worse after 2012.
Ask them to experiment. Do they feel happier when they spend less time on their phone? What might feel better? Trust them to work this out for themselves, and equally trust their ability to apply some critical thinking to what they are seeing online. Is there another point of view? Is what they are viewing curated to the point where it bears no relation to reality?
One study randomly assigned college students (there are fewer studies on adolescents, as it’s hard to get parental consent for studies on minors) to either greatly reduce the use of social media platforms for a period, or not to do so. The researchers then measured the students’ depressive symptoms three weeks later. They found that "the limited use group showed significant reductions in loneliness and depression over three weeks compared to the control group".
Collective action
I’m not suggesting keeping teenagers off phones or creating digital-free zones will be easy. Nor am I suggesting that we can stop our teenagers from using social media altogether. Individual efforts to resist its lure will be hard, given that a teenager will naturally argue that, well, all their friends are on social media.
For instance, take a teenage girl who stops using social media completely. If all her friends continue to spend five hours a day on the various platforms, she would be completely out of the loop and socially isolated. Social media creates a trap – a collective action problem – for children and for parents. An individual child might be worse off quitting Instagram, even though all children would be better off if everyone quit. The individual would be cut off. This social media paradox explains why teenagers sometimes don’t feel better if they digitally detox.
We need collective action for real change, so talk to other parents in your teenager’s circle to see if you can work together in creating guidelines.
In the meantime, we need to find ways for coping: agree that while they can be on their phone, they must time their use, or just use it less. We have to help our teenagers manage their phone use, just as we need to manage our own.
We can also acknowledge the online world has clearly brought with it some massive advantages, and teenagers, understandably, want to benefit too: there is nothing inherently wrong with digital connection. The internet is not innately satanic; not any more than Gutenberg’s printing press or the first transatlantic cables were. It can be useful to accept a teenager needs a phone to run their life, make plans with friends, book a train ticket and so on. Phones provide connection for young people too.
When teenagers talk to their contemporaries online, they feel they belong. They can show they care about each other, and intimacy can be important for those who find communication in real life more difficult.
The Gift of Teenagers: Connect More, Worry Less by Rachel Kelly, published by Hachette, is now available at Waterstones, WHSmith, and online.
The audiobook, narrated by Emma Fenney, can be listened to on Audible.