"Everything's the Phone": Understanding the Phone's Supercharged Role in Parent-Teen Relationships

Through focus groups (n=61) and surveys (n=2,083) of parents and teens, we investigated how parents and their teen children experience their own and each other's phone use in the context of parent-teen relationships. Both expressed a lack of agency in their own and each other's phone use, feeling overly reliant on their own phone and displaced by the other's phone. In a classic example of the fundamental attribution error, each party placed primary blame on the other, and rationalized their own behavior with legitimizing excuses. We present a conceptual model showing how parents' and teens' relationships to their phones and perceptions of each other's phone use are inextricably linked, and how, together, they contribute to parent-teen tensions and disconnections. We use the model to consider how the phone might play a less highly charged role in family life and contribute to positive connections between parents and their teen children.