Teen Boys Are Spending So Much Time on Their Phones, Even They’re Surprised

Would you be able to accurately guess how much time you spend on your phone every day? As part of SheKnows’ ongoing Be a Man series, we challenged a panel of teen boys to do just that. And the results? Well, let’s just say they were eye-opening — to us and them.

When 16-year-old Griffin estimated that he spent 2 to 3 hours daily on his phone, the true tally based on his phone data — 7 hours and 8 minutes per day on average — seemed shocking. 

“That is way more than I thought,” he said sheepishly. “I kinda forgot I’ve been on my phone ’til like 4 in the morning every night.” Calder, 16, was equally surprised at his total of 5 hours and 18 minutes, admitting, “It’s a … little bit more than I expected.” And Carson, also 16, estimated he spends approximately 6 hours a day on his phone — right now at least — but that figure, he confessed, bumps up to probably 8 or 9 hours during the school year.

It may seem like a lot; after all, that’s roughly equivalent to an entire workday. But according to the most recent available data, those numbers aren’t exactly abnormal. According to Common Sense Media, teens spend an average of 8.5 hours per day on screens — and that’s just social media, scrolling, and texting, not schoolwork. Almost half of the teens in a 2023 Pew survey reported that they “almost constantly” use the internet, nearly double the amount that gave the same response in the organization’s 2014-2015 survey (before the advent of TikTok and Instagram reels). YouTube was the overwhelming favorite platform, with 9 in 10 teens saying they use it — followed by Snapchat with 63 percent and Instagram with 59 percent. And they may not even consciously realize how much time they spend on their favorite apps, considering that most of the boys in SheKnows’ panel underestimated their screen time considerably. But as anybody with a smartphone knows, it’s not difficult to get sucked in.  

A 2024 survey conducted by Hopelab and Common Sense Media found that 80 percent of men and boys use social media for relaxing/unwinding when stressed — which is fine, unless it’s used to avoid coping with those stressors. “The internet can be an easy escape from reality,” Brandon Simpson, Associate Marriage and Family Therapist at Novus Mindful Life Institute Counseling and Recovery Center, tells She Knows. “When facing difficulties in real life or a teen boy’s day-to-day, they need to find adaptive and appropriate coping skills to their challenges, but the internet, because it provides an escape, can become a crutch used to appropriately deal with the challenges their boys will face.” The same survey also revealed that 42 percent of males find it hard to control how much time they spend on social media.

Crutch or not, there’s no denying that today’s teenagers spend their days with one foot in the physical world and the other in the digital. “Our review of young men’s online world confirms that their online communities dwarf their real-life spaces by a factor of at least a thousand,” says an August 2024 article in Time magazine, referencing a 6-month study of young men’s online lives conducted by Equimundo. “YouTube, the mothership of online platforms for young men, has about 2.49 billion monthly active users, between 55%-65% of which are men. Fantasy Football has 75 million users, more than two-thirds men. By contrast, 750,000 young men belong to U.S. fraternities and more than 1.1 million are in Scouting America.”

So what are they spending all their time looking at? 

“I see a lot of sneakers, basketball sneakers particularly, basketball highlights …” reported Ajani, 17, regarding his Instagram Explore page: a collection of suggested content curated by what the user has searched, viewed, and “liked” in the past. Calder’s feed contained soccer, deejaying, cars, and “maybe, like, a dog.” Sports, superheroes, comedy sketches, and movie highlights — and, of course, the occasional dog — made regular appearances.

Teen boys may be digital natives whose online habits prove that their socialization preferences differ vastly from their parents’, but if it seems like your teenager is perpetually on their phone, take heart; this — like so many other aspects of teendom — might just be a product of their age. And once they get past the point of peer validation being paramount in their lives, they might turn a corner … like 17-year-old Xavier, who says he’s had a recent reckoning of his own.

“I’ve kind of come to the realization that social media isn’t the center of my life,” he reflected. “It’s not where I wanna dedicate all my time.”