Parents fear social media is hurting family life. Study says otherwise

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For years, parents have been warned that social media is stealing family time, undermining relationships and replacing meaningful conversations with endless scrolling.

But a major new study suggests that one of the most common fears about social media may be overblown.

Researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology who tracked nearly 1,000 young people and their parents for a decade found little evidence that increased social media use harms family relationships.

Even when parents or children spent more time checking apps, posting online or using social platforms, family bonds did not appear to deteriorate as a result.

The findings, published in theJournal of Youth and Adolescence, challenge a popular assumption that social media is a major driver of family conflict and disconnection.

“Many people think that those who use social media more are more likely to also have worse family relationships,” Habib Niyaraq Nobakht, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Psychology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), told Newsweek. “This is not what we found.”

The research followed 979 participants in Norway from ages 10 to 20, collecting information from both adolescents and parents across six waves of data.

Rather than relying solely on self-reported screen habits, the team also incorporated interviews, observational measures and objective smartphone usage data.

That level of detail matters because previous studies have often found links between social media use and poorer family relationships.

But many of those studies were cross-sectional, meaning they captured only a snapshot in time and could not determine whether social media was actually causing family problems.

The researchers wanted to test a more difficult question: what happens when a family’s social media use increases over time?

The answer surprised them.

Nobakht said the researchers examined 106 possible correlations between social media use and family relationships, but only two remained significant after statistical corrections.

Notably, he said both relied on adolescents reporting both measures themselves, suggesting that reporting bias may have influenced findings in some previous studies.

“We didn’t find any evidence for either of them,” Nobakht said. “So, neither those who use social media more, nor those who increase their usual use, are at particular risk of having worse family functioning.”

The findings arrive at a time when concerns about technology’s impact on family life have become increasingly common.

Campaigns encouraging families to put phones away during meals and activities are often built around the idea that screen time inevitably displaces meaningful face-to-face interaction.

According to Nobakht, parents may be focusing on the wrong question.

“Our measures captured how much adolescents and parents used or checked social media and what adolescents did there… not the context of that use,” he said.

He suggested that how, when and where social media is used may matter far more than the amount of time spent on it.

Instead of worrying about whether family members spend three hours a day on social media or five, parents may want to pay closer attention to whether phones are interrupting conversations, meals or other important moments together.

“It would most likely make a difference if my head is on my phone while my wife is talking to me, or if an adolescent is having dinner with their family members and is constantly checking social media,” he said. “These are moment-to-moment interruptions, and that is where I would look next.”

For families, he said, the priority should be protecting key moments of togetherness—including meals, conversations and bedtime—rather than counting hours spent online.

Reference

Nobakht, H. N., Wichstrøm, L., & Steinsbekk, S. (2026). Social media use and the quality of family relationships: A six-wave longitudinal study of within-family effects from age 10 to 20. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 55, 1361–1373. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-026-02362-5

Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Kara Dolman and Gray R. Thomas

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