Study: Most Mealtime Screen Time Is TV, Not Social Media
What a new study of mealtime screen time does—and does not—say.
Everyone has seen them out at restaurants: the "iPad babies" and zoned-out families. Parents letting their children, some quite young, stare at phones or tablets throughout the meal, sometimes while mom and dad also look at screens.
It's easy to judge those families, though I try to remind myself that we, as casual onlookers, never know the full story. Maybe this almost never happens but tonight the parent has a crucial work deadline. Maybe it's been that rare kind of extraordinarily stressful day. Maybe that boy has developmental issues and this is the only way he can get through a restaurant meal, which the family needs to do because they're traveling. Maybe, whatever the reason, this is an anomaly and not the mealtime norm.
But screen time during meals may be the norm for many families, according to some new research published in JAMA Pediatrics.
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Hold up, though—before you call in Jonathan Haidt (or Josh Hawley, or Jean Twenge, or whoever your favorite tech-panic evangelist might be), take a closer look at what sorts of screens that kids are using. The most common form of mealtime media consumption for kids in this study was "watching content on a large-screen device." That is, a TV, or something akin to a TV.
In the study, a team of University of Arizona communications professors obtained data from 357 American parents. To be included in the study, parents had to have at least one child who's 4–10 years old and had to live with that child at least 75 percent of the time. These parents were asked to recall their most recent family meal and report on whether they and one of their children (for some reason, the study did not ask about all children) had consumed any media and, if so, what kind.
The vast majority of parents—77.6 percent—said they had had a helping of some sort of media during their most recent family meal. And so, too, did nearly 69 percent of the children included in the study.
This conjures up the classic restaurant-judgement fodder: a family all hunched over individual phones and tablets. But for the children, the most common type of screen time was watching something on a "large screen device," generally together with a parent. This was something done by 50.4 percent of the children in the study.
If we're really worried about screens eroding family together time and children's social skills, we should be bashing CNN and the Cartoon Network as much if not more than Meta and TikTok. Yet I don't see people calling for age-gating the remote control or requiring viewers to show government-issued identification to log into Netflix.
Granted, a lot of people surveyed were using phones during meals. But these, too, were frequently being used—at least by the kids in this survey—to watch things rather than to "play, text, or browse." This suggests that insofar as phone time during meals is a problem for kids, it may be an old kind of problem, not a perplexing new one.
Nearly half of the kids in this study—47.9 percent—reportedly "watch[ed] content on a small screen device" during their most recent family meal, while under one third (27.8 percent) used a smartphone to "play, text, or browse" or spent some time playing or working on a laptop or tablet (28.8 percent).
This isn't that much higher than the percentage of kids—20.7—who spent mealtime reading a physical book or magazine.
Parents were slightly more likely to read a book or magazine during meal time, with 24.1 percent doing so. They were much more likely to use a smartphone to "play, text, or browse" during a family meal, with 64.2 percent saying they had done so during their last family meal. For parents, this beat out watching content on a large screen (48.2 percent) or on a small screen (47.9 percent).
As writer Stephanie Murray points out, those figures "don't tell us anything about how much time the surveyed parents were, say, scrolling on their phone during dinner; only whether they did, at some point during the dinner, do so." Some of the parents in this category may have spent the whole dinner scrolling, sure, but some may have simply stopped at one point to answer a quick text.
What's clear from this data is that both children and parents are spending a lot of time with some sort of technology or media while eating, and often with multiple types of media. None of that seems ideal. But this (admittedly small) survey also presents a more complicated picture than crusaders against smartphones and social media tend to paint.
Many of the latter back laws that ban teenagers from using social media without parental consent, or laws requiring teens to get parental consent before downloading apps. These are predicated on the idea that parents will, frequently, not consent—that parents don't want their teens, let alone younger kids, to be using phones and tablets all the time. (If all parents consent, then none of the alleged harms of social media will be mitigated, after all.)
But if a large number of parents are allowing their 4- to 10-year-olds to have screen time—including phone and tablet time—around the dinner table, that suggests that most parents aren't exactly clamoring for government-imposed controls on childhood tech use, and many, if not most, would give consent for their kids to use various age-gated platforms and apps. Even if you accept the argument that all smartphone or social media use is bad for kids, we would be mandating a mass invasion of privacy (age verification of all social media users) for very little benefit.
We also wouldn't necessarily be guaranteeing that the kids put down their devices—even during family meal time, since the main things they seem to be doing on them are watching TV or TV-by-any-other-name, not scrolling social media.
In the News
Meta asks SCOTUS to stop addiction lawsuit. Meta has petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to weigh in on whether Section 230 and the First Amendment protect the tech company against lawsuits like the one filed by the state of Nevada, which is suing Meta over several Facebook and Instagram features. The state's Supreme Court recently held that decisions about how to display user-generated content are not "expressive First Amendment activity."
"While the petition unveiled Thursday only deals with Nevada's suit, a ruling from the Supreme Court could affect all of the addiction-related lawsuits currently pending against social platforms," notes the MediaPost. More:
Meta specifically argues to the Supreme Court that Section 230 and the First Amendment shield publishers from liability over editorial choices, including determinations about how to present user-generated content.
"Online publishers, like their print-media precursors, must constantly make editorial decisions about how to display third-party content—such as whether to provide a continuous stream or limited selection of content, to target a particular audience, or to prioritize short-form over long-form material," Meta writes.
"Speech and press liberties ensure that a plaintiff could never sue a newspaper for arranging its stories to maximize subscriptions or cable news for teasing stories before commercial breaks to keep viewers tuned in," the company adds. "The answer should be no different for social media."
Read This Thread
A lot of high-tech medical breakthroughs were announced last week:
1/ I'm a cardiologist. I've practiced for twenty-five years, through a lot of "breakthroughs" that turned out to be press releases. So understand the weight of what I'm about to say: I have never seen a single week in medicine like the one we just lived through.
In the span of a…— Afshine Emrani MD FACC (@afshineemrani) August 22, 2026
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