Could you guess exactly how much time you spend on your phone every day? As part of SheKnows’ ongoing series “Be a Man,” we asked a group of teens to do just that. And the results? Well, let’s just say they were eye-opening – for us And them.

When 16-year-old Griffin estimated that he spent 2 to 3 hours a day on the phone, the actual number based on his phone data—an average of 7 hours and 8 minutes per day—shocked him.

“That means Away more than I thought,” he said sheepishly. “I had somehow forgotten that I was on the phone until 4 a.m. every night.” Calder, 16, was equally surprised at his total of 5 hours and 18 minutes, admitting, “That’s … a little more than I expected.” And Carson, also 16, estimates he spends about 6 hours a day on the phone — at least for now — but that number, he confessed, probably rises to 8 or 9 hours during the school year.

That may seem like a lot; after all, it’s about the same as a full workday. But according to the latest available data, these numbers are not exactly unusual. According to Common Sense Media, teenagers spend an average of 8.5 hours a day in front of screens – and that’s Only social media, scrolling and texting, not schoolwork. Nearly half of teens in a 2023 Pew survey said they use the internet “almost constantly” — nearly double the rate in the organization’s 2014-2015 survey (before the advent of TikTok and Instagram Reels). And they may not even be aware of how much time they spend on their favorite apps, considering most of the boys in the SheKnows panel significantly underestimated their screen time. But as anyone with a smartphone knows, it’s not hard to get sucked in.

A 2024 survey conducted by Hopelab and Common Sense Media found that 80 percent of men and boys use social media to relax/unwind when stressed—which is fine, unless it’s being used to avoid the stressors. “The internet can be an easy escape from reality,” Brandon Simpson, marriage and family therapist at Novus Mindful Life Institute Counseling and Recovery Center, tells She Knows. “When teens face difficulties in real life or everyday life, they need to find adaptive and appropriate coping strategies for their challenges, but the internet, because it provides an escape, can become a crutch they use to appropriately deal with the challenges their boys are facing.” The same survey also found that 42 percent of men find it difficult to control how much time they spend on social media.

Crutch or not, there is no denying that today’s teenagers spend their days with one foot in the physical world and the other in the digital one. “Our study of young men’s online world confirms that their online communities dwarf their real-world spaces by at least a factor of a thousand,” says an August 2024 article in Time Magazine, citing a six-month study of young men’s online lives conducted by Equimundo. “YouTube, the mothership of online platforms for young men, has about 2.49 billion monthly active users, of whom between 55% and 65% are men. Fantasy football has 75 million users, of whom more than two-thirds are men. In contrast, 750,000 young men belong to American fraternities and more than 1.1 million are in Scouting America.”

So what are they watching all the time?

“I see a lot of sneakers, especially basketball shoes, basketball highlights…” 17-year-old Ajani said of his Instagram Explore page: a collection of suggested content curated based on what the user has searched, viewed and “liked” in the past. Calder’s feed included football, DJs, cars and “maybe something like a dog.” Sports, superheroes, comedy sketches and movie highlights – and of course the odd dog – appeared regularly.

In the 2023 Pew survey, YouTube was by far the most popular platform, with 9 in 10 teens saying they use it—followed by Snapchat at 63 percent and Instagram at 59 percent. In the SheKnows group of teens, Snapchat was the highest-scoring app. But the very things that make it appealing to them are things that seem, well, downright troubling when you’re a parent. (Common Sense Media has a helpful guide for parents that explains how it works in detail.) The popular messaging app has raised privacy concerns among its teen users. Snapchat allows users to send disappearing messages and share photos with known and unknown contacts. In addition, its “Snap Map” feature tracks users’ locations in real time and can be viewed by a large number of people. (Griffin, for example, tells us that around 250 users can see where he is at any given time.) This can lead to feelings of FOMO in teens, who may feel left out when their friends get together without them.

Still, the Pew survey found that teens’ experiences with social media are overwhelmingly positive: The majority of teens reported feeling more connected to their friends, having places to express themselves creatively, receiving support from others and feeling more accepted. Teen girls are more likely than boys to say social media makes them feel excluded from their friends (37 percent vs. 24 percent) or makes them feel worse about their own lives (28 percent vs. 18 percent).

Despite the overall positive attitude toward social media, some teens in our panel still had concerns about committing to Snapchat. The older teens in the group seemed a little less excited about the app, or at least some of its features. This finding is reinforced by some of the comments about “Snapstreaks,” which counts how many consecutive days users have spent sending Snaps to their friends (and for some users, that’s a badge of honor). “As far as Snapstreaks goes, I think the older you get and the more you use it, the less you care,” said 17-year-old Xavier.

“I think Snapchat is a waste of time,” 19-year-old Lincoln told us. “I got really tired of sending people a photo of my face… it’s very important and it’s kind of ‘insulting’ if you forget it.”

These boys may be digital natives whose online habits prove that their socialization preferences are very different from their parents’, but if it seems like your teen is constantly on their phone, don’t worry; this – like so many other aspects of being a teenager – could simply be a product of their age. And once they get past the point where peer validation is no longer the most important thing in their lives, they could turn things around… like Xavier, who says he recently had a reckoning of his own.

“I’ve come to the realization that social media is not the center of my life,” he reflected. “I don’t want to spend all my time there.”