American parents and their teenagers are looking at the same screens and reaching very different conclusions. A major Pew Research Center report published on April 15, 2026 finds that parents are more likely to label their teen’s screen time as “too much” than teens themselves.
Among parents whose teen uses TikTok, 44 percent think their teen spends too much time on the app, compared with 28 percent of teens who say the same.
A persistent perception gap
The gap is not unique to TikTok. The share of parents who say the same of Snapchat and Instagram is lower, but the same pattern continues for both platforms, with parents being more likely than teens to describe their teen’s use of those sites as excessive. Few parents say the time their teen spends on any of the three sites is too little.
The findings come from a survey of 1,458 dyads, each comprised of one US teen age 13 to 17 and one parent per teen, conducted September 25 to October 9, 2025. The overall margin of error for both teens and parents is plus or minus 3.3 percentage points.
Why teens are on these platforms
Teens largely turn to these social media sites for fun and connection, though experiences around messaging, screen time and cyberbullying vary considerably by platform. For the first time, Pew Research Center went deeper into comparing teens’ experiences on three widely used platforms: TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat.
Teens on TikTok and Instagram visit those platforms for news more than teens on Snapchat.
American teens keep up with celebrities through TikTok and Instagram , with majorities of teens on both platforms citing that as a reason they visit, according to the report.
Snapchat stands out for teens saying it helps their friendships, just under half of its teen users report this, higher than the shares on Instagram or TikTok who say the same. Far fewer teens say these sites hurt their friendships.
How daily use stacks up
The report arrives as independent data underscores how central these platforms have become to teenage daily life. Among US teens aged 13 to 17, 73 percent go on YouTube daily, about six in ten visit TikTok daily, and roughly half are on Instagram or Snapchat each day, according to Pew’s December 2024 teen survey.
A separate December 2025 Pew report introduced a new dimension to the picture: 64 percent of US teens use AI chatbots, including about three in ten who do so daily , suggesting that the screen-time debate is already broadening well beyond traditional social feeds. That data point echoes questions GCN has previously explored about screen habits, and highlights how difficult it is for any single metric to capture the full scope of teen digital life.
What the gap means for families
The divergence in perception between parents and teens is more than a household disagreement. When parents systematically perceive a problem that teens do not recognize, it shapes how families negotiate rules, how platforms design parental tools, and how legislators frame regulation.
On December 10, 2025, the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024 came into effect in Australia, requiring social media platforms to take reasonable steps to prevent individuals under the age of 16 from creating and keeping social media accounts. Social media platforms including Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram and X are among those subject to the restrictions.
Pew’s survey methodology, which pairs each teen directly with one of their own parents, gives the perception gap unusual credibility. Unlike opt-in online polls that struggle to screen out inauthentic respondents, the matched dyad design means every parental response is anchored to a specific child’s actual reported behavior.
Ipsos recruited the teens through their parents, who were already members of its KnowledgePanel , lending the matched-pair data a degree of representational rigor that standalone surveys rarely achieve.
The full report, including platform-by-platform breakdowns by race, ethnicity and gender, is available directly from Pew Research Center.
