SAN FRANCISCO: Study by the Pew Research Centre reveals that 73% of American teens have access to smart phone.
Add in the 15% of teens who have a basic cell phone and 88% of American teens aged 13 to 17 have access to a mobile phone of some sort.
Only 12% of the teens told Pew they didn’t have a cell phone of any type.
Mobile phones and access to social media through them are a major part of teens’ lives today, said Amanda Lenhart, lead author on the report published Thursday.
The Pew survey of more than 1,000 teens found that 92% of teens go online daily and 24% say they are online “almost constantly.”
“It’s very easy to feel as though you are nearly constantly online when you have a buzzing, ringing, music-playing connective device in your pocket 15 or more hours a day,” Lenhart said.
Amy Treadwell lives in Novato, Calif. and sees the pattern with her daughter’s friends. “I’ll have three girls in the back seat of my car and they’ve all got phones. They’re interacting, but not interacting,” she said.
Just 12% of teens said they only went online once-a-day and a meagre 6% said they went online weekly.
While the siren song of the internet can feel like it pulls teens from family life, in some ways it also allows parents to connect with their children, said Nancy Costello in Ann Arbor, Mich.
Costello’s daughter got a smart phone when she turned 13. One upside has been the glimpse she gets into her daughter’s daily life.
“I can gauge where she is mood-wise by what she posts or what she tweets,” said Costello, who made it a rule that she gets to follow her daughter on social media. “I’m guessing that I probably know more about my kid as a 14-year-old than my mother knew about me when I was that age.”
A media lawyer, Costello’s also uses her daughter and her friends as a way to understand what’s hot in social media. “Facebook is where baby-boomers are going, but for people below 20, it’s not about Facebook, it’s others Twitter and Instagram and Snapchat,” she said.
Flip phones still popular, at least with some parents
Close to one-third of teens don’t smartphones. The survey found that 30% have a basic cell phone that doesn’t access the internet.
While this group as a whole tends to come from lower-income families, one interesting anomaly was the high percentage of teens whose parents graduated from college who have only basic cell phones. Their numbers are comparable with teens whose parents had only graduated from high school or had some college, 16% compared with 15% and 12% respectively.
“We would expect to see fewer teens with highly-educated parents with just a basic phone, but we don’t. It does suggest a choice rather than economics at play for that group,” said Lenhart.
Almost all of these teens have access to a computer at home, so their families may see a smartphone as more a lifestyle choice than a need.
In San Francisco, Maureen Persico bought her son a $20 flip phone because she saw no reason to spend hundreds of dollars to buy him one that might be gone at any second. “For the longest time he’d forget his shoes if they weren’t on his feet,” she said.
He wasn’t very sanguine about the phone. In a city where cell phone theft is rampant, she told him to keep his phone in his pocket and never take it out on the bus. However her son argued that the phone was so down market, “that no one would ever want to steal it,” she said.
Persico knows that some families have a philosophy of “the best of everything for my kid.” She doesn’t. “It’s like saying ‘Why don’t I give my kid a Lamborghini?'”
Instead, she’s trying to teach her son moderation and the idea that he has to work to get fancy gadgets. “He’ll have to earn it,” she said.
The survey was conducted in English and Spanish with teens and their parents in the fall of 2014 and the spring of 2015. It was commissioned by the Pew Research Centre, a nonpartisan think tank based in Washington D.C.
