We told our kids to put down their phones. Now they’re telling us.

We told our kids to put down their phones. Now they’re telling us.

I got my first iPhone in 2011, when it became available through Verizon. My first training about kids, social media and smartphones was in 2012. So it wasn’t long before I started seeing how this new technology was showing up in young people’s lives, relationships and mental health.

At the time, I was seeing it mainly with high school students. Over the years, those conversations moved into middle schools and eventually elementary schools. I’m not currently connected to a preschool, so I can’t speak from experience about what teachers are seeing there. But I suspect plenty of little ones are already arriving with some experience swiping a screen.

For a long time, I watched this trend move toward younger ages. Lately, I’ve been paying more attention to what is happening at the other end. The kids who grew up with smartphones are now watching their parents and grandparents develop some of the same habits we’ve spent years warning them about.

Before the iPhone, the iPod made it easy to carry your music with you. Smartphones took that convenience much further, putting our camera, email, directions, entertainment and eventually most of our daily routines into one device. Over time, people across generations found their own reasons to pick one up and keep it nearby.

Social media followed a similar path. What once felt like a young person’s world became a place where parents shared family pictures, grandparents kept up with grandchildren, and just about everyone found a group, a hobby or an opinion to follow. There were good reasons to join, and there are still good reasons to use it.

In my world, I’ve spent years trying to understand how technology affects kids and how we, as adults, can help them develop a healthy digital routine. But I’m picking up on a struggle I hadn’t really predicted. Older teens and college students are noticing their parents’ technology use, and sometimes they are describing it with the same word adults have used about them: addiction.

Picture a college student coming home for the weekend and trying to tell a parent about life on campus. The parent is listening, sort of, while watching one more video. Or think about a teenager being told to put the phone away at dinner while an adult keeps checking messages under the table.

These are everyday examples, not stories about particular families I’ve worked with. But I suspect plenty of people can recognize some version of them in their own home. It’s uncomfortable when the reminder to look up starts coming from the person we used to remind.

A New York Post article published September 22 put some numbers behind this shift. It reported that adults over 65 spend an estimated 104 minutes a day on social media, citing Statista. That’s an hour and 44 minutes, and it made me think about how much of an afternoon can disappear into a feed.

The article also pointed to AARP and Pew Research Center data. AARP reports that 91% of adults 50 and older had used social media in the previous three months, including 72% using Facebook. Pew’s February 2026 survey found that 23% of adults 65 and older and 42% of those ages 50 to 64 said they use AI chatbots.

Those numbers describe use, not addiction. They don’t tell us whether someone is enjoying pictures from family, learning something useful or losing hours to videos they never intended to watch. But they do show why a conversation about healthy technology habits needs to include the adults in the room.

Over the past year, I’ve been talking a lot with college-aged adults about trying to rein technology back in. They are starting to recognize how distracted they feel, how difficult it can be to stay on task, and how much effort it takes to build a life that doesn’t revolve around a device. Recognizing the problem, though, doesn’t automatically make changing it easy.

You sit down to work on an assignment and check one notification first. You open your phone to see tomorrow’s weather and somehow end up watching a stranger reorganize a kitchen. You finally get into bed, decide to watch one more video, and look up to find that the time you planned to spend sleeping has become time spent scrolling.

The details may change with age, but the pattern is familiar. A student gets pulled into TikTok, a parent into Instagram Reels, and a grandparent into Facebook videos. We may have different feeds, but we can all lose track of why we picked up the phone in the first place.

We often talk about dopamine when we talk about these habits. I don’t want to reduce every moment on a screen to a brain chemical or call everyone who enjoys social media addicted. What I do want us to notice is how easily the promise of something funny, interesting or upsetting can keep us reaching for the next thing, even after we meant to stop.

Now AI adds another layer to this conversation. What happens when the device that already holds our attention starts to feel like something that knows us? What happens when, instead of simply giving us another video, it gives us a response?

Depending on the chatbot and its settings, it may remember details from earlier conversations, respond warmly and be available whenever we reach for it. Imagine a student who feels lonely at midnight or an adult who has had a rough day and doesn’t want to bother anyone. A conversation that is available immediately, with no scheduling and no awkward opening, can have a strong appeal.

Watching The AI Dilemma, I was struck by the Center for Humane Technology’s description of a shift from the race to the bottom of the brainstem to a race for intimacy. The concern is that competition moves beyond keeping us watching and toward becoming the place we turn for comfort, reassurance and companionship. I find myself wondering which platform will become someone’s first stop after a difficult day, before they think to call a friend.

There are useful ways to use AI, and I’ll be writing more about this in the future. For now, I want us to pause before we settle into another habit that becomes hard to change. We’ve already seen how quickly a convenient tool can become something we check without even thinking.

Maybe the place to start is with the device in our own hand. When someone we love walks into the room, do we look up? When there is a quiet moment, can we let it stay quiet, or do we immediately reach for something to fill it?

I think there is an opportunity here for families to work on this together. An adult can say, “I’ve noticed I’m on my phone more than I want to be. Have you noticed it too?” We can listen to the answer without immediately pointing out how much time the kids spend on theirs.

Then we can try something manageable: a meal with everyone’s phones put away, a walk where we leave them at home, or a conversation where we finish listening before checking the notification. If we get distracted, we can acknowledge it and come back. Our kids can see us practicing the same habits we ask them to develop.

After years of helping adults understand kids’ technology habits, I’m seeing the conversation come back around. Some of those kids are now asking us to look up, listen and put our own phones away. We can take that as an invitation to work on this together, and let them see us making changes too.

We are more than a scroll, and our kids are more than a profile. There is still plenty of life waiting when we look up, and we can help each other get back to it.

~Ryan