What Phone Culture Is Doing to the American Family
For a decade, worried parents have asked how to get their kids off their phones. Increasingly, the research suggests they may be asking the wrong question, or at least aiming it at the wrong generation. Mom and Dad have a phone problem too, and their kids are the ones paying for it.
Walk into any pediatrician’s waiting room, school pickup line, or church nursery in America, and you will see the same scene repeated over and over: a parent, phone in hand, thumb scrolling, while a child a few feet away waits, sometimes patiently, sometimes not, to simply be looked at. This magazine has written before about what constant phone and AI companion use is doing to American teenagers. It is time to ask an equally uncomfortable question, one most parenting coverage quietly avoids: what is it doing to American parents, and to the children who are growing up watching them do it? According to a recent One poll survey of two thousand American parents, 69 percent admit they feel “addicted” to their phones. The average parent surveyed spends two hours and seventeen minutes on their phone daily, a figure only twenty four minutes less than the time they spend with their own children. Sixty two percent openly admit they spend too much time on their phone while their kids are right there with them. This is not a story about screens ruining childhood from the outside in. It is a story about the example being set from the inside out.
A Confession Most Parents Won’t Say Out Loud
The numbers above are worth sitting with, because they represent something rarer than most survey data: parents telling the truth about themselves rather than about their children. Half of the parents in that same One poll survey said their own child had, at some point, directly asked them to put the phone away. Family and adolescent therapist Darby Fox, discussing the findings publicly, put the core problem in the simplest possible terms: when a parent takes a child to the playground with a phone in hand, the child ends up playing alone while the parent merely stands nearby. “The kids absolutely notice that,” Fox said. They notice, and, according to a growing body of research, they remember, they imitate, and in many cases, they suffer for it.
This is not a fringe anxiety confined to a single survey. A separate nationally representative Highlights Magazine State of the Kid Survey asked children ages six to twelve a direct question: are your parents ever distracted when you are trying to talk to them? Sixty two percent said yes. When asked what distracted their parents most, cell phones topped the list at 28 percent, ahead of siblings at 25 percent and work at 16 percent. Children are not confused about what is competing for their parents’ attention. They can name it.
Fast Facts
69 percent: Share of American parents who admit they feel “addicted” to their phones, per a national Onepoll survey
2 hours, 17 minutes: Average daily time parents spend on their phones, nearly matching time spent with their own children
62 percent: Share of children ages 6 to 12 who say their parents get distracted when the child is trying to talk to them
56 percent: Rate at which caregivers absorbed in a phone at a playground failed to respond at all to a child’s bid for attention, per a University of Washington study
50 percent: Share of children ages 5 to 17 who say their parents check their phones too much, per Zero to Three research
What the Research Calls “Technoference”
Researchers now have a specific term for what happens when a parent’s device use interrupts their relationship with their child: technoference. A 2025 meta-analysis published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research found a significant, consistent association between parental technoference and problematic media use in children, an effect that grows stronger when both parents in a household are heavily absorbed in their devices rather than just one. A separate study of 183 families with young children, published this year, found that 61 percent of mothers and 38 percent of fathers spent more than half an hour a day on social media, with mothers in particular more likely to say that use was cutting directly into family time, and found that the parents reporting the heaviest device use were also the ones reporting the most parenting stress.
Researchers at Illinois State University, among the first to study this phenomenon directly, found something particularly worth noting for any parent inclined to brush this off as a minor issue: parents who reported having trouble managing their own device use were significantly more likely to report technoference disrupting their relationship with their child, and those disruptions were linked to real behavioral consequences, including increases in both internalizing behavior, like whining and sulking, and externalizing behavior, like hyperactivity and temper outbursts. This is not a hypothetical concern dressed up in academic language. It is a measurable pattern showing up in household after household, study after study.
The Children Are Watching, and Counting
Beyond survey data, researchers have gone into homes, playgrounds, and even fast food restaurants to observe distracted parenting directly, and the findings are sobering. A University of Washington study of caregivers at playgrounds found that when children tried to interrupt an adult who was absorbed in a phone, the adult failed to respond at all, no words, no glance, nothing, 56 percent of the time. Forty four percent of the parents, nannies, and babysitters surveyed in that same study admitted they felt they should be limiting their phone use around children and felt guilty that they were not. A separate observational study led by pediatric researcher Jenny Radesky watched caregivers and children during meals at fast food restaurants and found that forty of fifty five caregivers used a mobile device at some point during the meal, with sixteen using it almost continuously. The caregivers who were most absorbed, keeping their eyes locked on the screen even while responding to their child, were also the ones most likely to respond harshly when their child misbehaved, a pattern that suggests distracted parenting does not simply reduce attention, it can actively make parenting itself more short tempered and less patient.
Zero to Three, a research organization focused on early childhood, found that half of parents surveyed admitted technology interrupts their interactions with their children at least three times a day, and separately found that half of children ages five to seventeen believe their parents check their phones too much, with more than a third saying their parents get visibly distracted during conversations. Children, in other words, are not simply competing with a device for attention. They are keeping score.
The Damage Isn’t Just a Feeling
The consequences documented in the research go well beyond hurt feelings. A landmark meta-analysis published in JAMA Pediatrics in May 2025, led by researchers at the University of Wollongong, systematically reviewed the connection between parental technology use in a child’s presence and measurable outcomes in early childhood health and development, adding rigorous, peer reviewed weight to what smaller studies had suggested for years. Earlier research out of Indiana University found something striking about infants specifically: toddlers’ ability to learn new words was measurably disrupted when their mothers were briefly interrupted by a phone call during play, a reminder that even brief distraction during the earliest years of language development carries a real cost. Babies, researchers note, learn overwhelmingly by imitation, watching a caregiver’s face, eyes, and expressions to build the foundation of social and emotional understanding, and a caregiver whose eyes are locked on a screen simply cannot supply those cues.
Older children are not spared either. Research compiled by the nonprofit Children and Screens found that teenagers whose parents are frequently distracted by devices report worse mental health outcomes, along with more frequent and more violent behavior, compared with teens whose parents are less distracted. And in one of the more troubling findings for any parent hoping their own habits are simply a private matter, a study of more than three thousand fourth graders in China found that parental technoference predicted the children’s own problematic smartphone use directly, and also indirectly, by first damaging the parent-child relationship and encouraging more negative parenting styles, which then made the child’s own device dependence worse. In plain terms: a phone-distracted parent does not just miss moments with their child. They appear to be quietly training that child toward the very same dependence.
“We learn by imitation from the very start. That’s how we’re wired.”
— Linda Stone, former Apple and Microsoft executive, on why children mirror their parents’ phone habits
The Hypocrisy That Undermines Everything We Tell Our Kids
This magazine has spent real space urging parents to pay closer attention to what their children are doing on screens, and that concern remains entirely justified. But it is worth being honest about the limits of that message if it is delivered by a parent who cannot put their own phone down at dinner. Children do not primarily learn values from lectures. They learn them by watching what the adults who love them actually do, especially in unguarded moments, at the playground, at the dinner table, at bedtime, when no one thinks a lesson is being taught. A household that restricts a teenager’s phone while both parents scroll through the evening in silence is not really teaching restraint. It is teaching a double standard, and children, the research above makes clear, notice double standards faster than almost anything else.
What Faith and Family Communities Can Do About It
The good news buried in all of this research is that the fix does not require new legislation, new apps, or a technological breakthrough. It requires parents willing to treat their own phone habits with the same seriousness they expect from their children. That can look like genuinely device free meals, not phones face down on the table but phones in another room entirely, since researchers have found that even an inactive phone sitting nearby measurably reduces attentiveness. It can look like a weekly Sabbath rhythm many Christian families have practiced for generations, a set window of time each week set apart from screens entirely and devoted to family, worship, and rest, a rhythm that predates smartphones by millennia and may be exactly the corrective this moment calls for. It can look simply like a parent choosing, at the playground or the dinner table, to put the phone away first, before asking a child to do the same, and trusting that the relationship rebuilt in that small daily choice matters more than whatever notification was waiting.
The Bottom Line
The conversation about children, technology, and family life has for years been aimed almost entirely in one direction, at the child’s device, the child’s screen time, the child’s addiction. The research increasingly says that conversation is incomplete, and in many homes, it may be starting with the wrong person entirely. Sixty nine percent of American parents already know, in their own words, that they are addicted to their phones. Their children, in survey after survey, are telling researchers the exact same thing about their parents that parents so often say about them. If this country wants to raise a generation capable of putting the phone down, it will need a generation of parents willing to go first.
References
Onepoll survey via Fox News, “Should parents start making screen time rules for themselves?”
Highlights Magazine, “State of the Kid Survey,” cited in Psychology Today, “Are You a Distracted Parent?”
Journal of Medical Internet Research, “Parental Technoference and Child Problematic Media Use: Meta-Analysis,” 2025
PMC/NIH, “Parent social media use and gaming on mobile phones, technoference in family time, and parenting stress,” April 2025
Thoughtful Parent, “Technoference: How Digital Distraction Impacts Parenting,” November 2025
Zero to Three, “Screens and Parenting: Managing ‘Technoference’ in a Digital World”
Children and Screens, “What is Technoference?”
JAMA Pediatrics, “Parental Technology Use in a Child’s Presence and Health and Development in the Early Years: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis,” May 2025
University of Washington Magazine, “Cellphone guilt among parents is real, UW study finds”
Greater Good Magazine, UC Berkeley, “Three Tips for Parents to Put Away Their Phones”
Psychology Research and Behavior Management, “The Relationship of Parent-Child Technoference and Child Problematic Smartphone Use,” 2024
Ami Magazine, “Distracted Parenting,” featuring Linda Stone
