How Much Time Do Teens Spend on Smartphones During School Hours?

Quick answer: On average, teens spend about an hour and a half on their smartphones, during school hours, engaged in non-school related activities.

Key Points, i.e. What Teens Do on Their Phones During School:

• Browse social media
• Send messages on social media
• Stream video
• Play video games
• Stream music
• Send emails

Smartphone Use and Mental Health Among Teens

Over the past ten years, teen development experts, mental health experts, public policy experts, parents, and teens themselves have engaged in a vigorous debate about the impact of screen time of children and teens. Here’s an overview of what the evidence tells us so far:

• Measuring screen time alone doesn’t help us understand the impact of device usage/screens on child and teen mental health
• Measuring the type of use does help us understand the impact of device usage/screens on child and teen mental health
• Heavy social media use – more than three hours per day – is associated with significant increases in symptoms of depression and anxiety
• Heavy social media use among 14-year-olds is associated with low self-esteem and experiencing bullying an online harassment
• Daily use of social media among teen girls is associated with increased risk of depression and eating disorders
• Teen girls who engage in negative comparison on social media show the most significant risk of depression, eating disorders, decreased self-esteem, and distorted body image.

Based on that evidence, here’s what we know:

Heavy social media use can have a negative impact on teen mental health, and teen girls who negative compare are at the highest risk of the negative consequences of social media use.

To learn more, please navigate to our blog and read these articles:

Does Social Media Harm Teen Mental Health?

Screen Time at Bedtime: What’s the Impact on Kids and Early Adolescents?

Those articles can help explain the data we currently have on the impact of screen time and social media on kids and teens. We encourage you to read those, as well as learn the new information provided by the latest research on the topic, which we’ll discuss below.

Time, Teens, Smartphones, and School

Research shows teens aged 13 to 18 spend an average of 8.5 hours a day engaging with screen-based media. However, few studies measure the amount of time teens spend on smartphones during school hours. A new publication, Adolescent Smartphone Use During School Hours, acquired usage data with a device called a Reality Meter installed on the smartphones of 117 teens. Researchers examined daily usage data during school hours – 8:00 am to 2:30 pm – for two months during 2023. They determined the following:

• Average daily use during school
• Type of use:
  • Messaging
  • Social Media
  • Games
  • Streaming video
  • Streaming audio
  • Reading/writing emails

Let’s take a look at what they found.

Teens and Smartphones During School: The Results

This study was relatively straightforward. Researchers reviewed the data collected by the Reality Meter, checked for obvious errors or inconsistencies, then organized it for presentation and discussion. Here’s what they learned about how long teens used smartphones during school:

Smartphone Use: Time

• Average daily smartphone use during school: 1.5 hours
  • That’s 23% of a school day lasting 6.5 hours
  • That’s 27% of the average 6.6 hours of teen smartphone use per day
• High/heavy smartphone use during school hours: 25% of teens spent more than 2 hours during school hours using smartphones

Next, they reported how teens used their smartphones during school:

Smartphone Use: Most Used Apps/Types of Use

1. Social media: 26 minutes
   • Instagram: 25 minutes
   • Messaging: 20 minutes
   • Facebook: 20 minutes
   • TikTok: 19 minutes
2. Video streaming: 17 minutes
3. Games: 13 minutes
4. Audio streaming: 5 minutes
5. Email: 4 minutes

What this data shows us is that teen smartphone use occupies a significant percentage of the school day. On average, teens use smartphones almost 1/4^th of the time they’re at school. As we continue to explore the causes of the teen mental health crisis and understand why standardized test scores in reading and mathematics have declined every year since 2012, we encourage parents, teachers, school administrators, and education policymakers to seriously consider proposals or plans to reduce or completely prevent smartphone use during school hours.