Do Your Parents Have a Screen-Time Problem?

A friend of mine had just traveled across the country to see his family when he texted me, deeply concerned. The chaos of holiday travel is always a drag, but usually, it was offset by getting a break and watching his kids spend quality time with their grandparents. But this year was different, he said: “They were just absorbed in their phones a lot of the time, and distant.” He wasn’t talking about the kids, but the grandparents. I’ve heard similar anecdotes in recent years—adult children worried about their parents slipping into screen addiction as they age. Stories like this pervade the internet. (One representative thread from the Millennials Subreddit: “Are all of our parents addicted to their phones?”) These accounts are striking in part because they mirror the concerns parents have been expressing for years about their children—that young minds are being influenced and warped by devices designed to seize and capitalize on their attention. Screen-time panics typically position children as being without agency, completely at the mercy of evil tech companies that adults must intervene to defend against. But a version of the problem exists on the opposite side of the age spectrum, too: instead of a phone-based childhood , a phone-based retirement. Over the past year, I asked people to share their stories with me. “I am constantly begging my mom to put her phone down, every time I see her she is just mindlessly scrolling. I swear her attention span is GONE,” one person wrote. Another described a parent as “playing Candy Crush for hours while the grandkids fight for a spot on her lap to play with her because that’s ‘spending time together.’” Some described what sounded like an omnipresent sensory assault: “Visiting my folks is very often two TVs blaring in different parts of the house while everyone scrolls their ipads/phones,” one person wrote. Many of the messages were quite blunt: “I’ve had to tell my boomer parents not to be glued to their iPads around our 3yr old.” Many people messaged me privately to express real concern. Most asked me not to use their full name, as they did not want to speak publicly about their family members. Josh, who lives in Ohio, said his father is consumed by vertical-video content on Instagram and TikTok. “I definitely think it’s more of a coping thing with him,” he said. “He has depression and bad anxiety. Trying to get him to turn to better hobbies.” Others were concerned about scams. “Worry more about him online than I do my 11 yo,” a man named Conor said. “Every time I go back home I have to take my dad’s iPhone and unsubscribe him from the myriad of scam virus scanning subscription apps he’s been duped into downloading from an ad in some word game or something. Had to turn off his ability to download apps from the App Store as a preventative measure.” One person who wished to remain totally anonymous said their parent had been...

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