Research institute · Pew Research Center
Pew: parents go 3-to-1 negative on teen social media impact
Pew's April 2026 survey of 1,458 US parents and their teens finds parents leaning roughly three-to-one negative on social media's impact on mental health, and most uncomfortable with their teen on TikTok, 73% of non-using parents say they would not be comfortable if their teen joined the platform.
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Key findings at a glance
- 44% Of parents whose teen uses TikTok, the share who say their teen spends too much time on the app.
- 28% Of TikTok-using teens who say the same about their own screen time, a 16-point parent–teen perception gap.
- 24% Parents who say social media hurts their teen's mental health.
- 8% Parents who say social media helps their teen's mental health, a three-to-one negative skew.
- 85% Parents who say they regularly talk with their teen about social media use, consistent across gender, race and income.
- 73% Parents whose teen does NOT currently use TikTok who say they would be uncomfortable if their teen joined the platform.
- 60% Parents whose teen uses Instagram who say they are comfortable with that. Around half say the same of TikTok or Snapchat.
- 16% Parents whose teen uses Instagram who say they are uncomfortable with the platform, roughly half the discomfort rate for TikTok and Snapchat.
- 41% Parents in households earning $75,000 or more who say social media negatively impacts their teen's productivity.
- 29% Parents in lower-earning households who say the same, a 12-point income split on productivity concerns.
What the report covers
This is the parents' companion to Pew's main April 2026 teen-platform study. Pew surveyed 1,458 US parents of 13-17 year-olds and their teens online between 25 September and 9 October 2025 via Ipsos's KnowledgePanel, with an overall margin of error of ±3.3 percentage points. The questions cover four areas: parents' perception of social media's net impact on their teen's well-being, time spent on TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat, comfort with each platform, and how often the pair discuss social-media use.
The headline frame is that parents are more negative than positive on social media's effect on their teen across every dimension Pew measured. Sleep and productivity both skew net-negative, mental health goes 3-to-1 negative (24% hurts vs 8% helps), and friendships are the only area where parents lean positive at all (and only mildly, 20% vs 13%). The more useful finding for marketers is platform-specific: parents draw a sharp line between Instagram, which they tolerate, and TikTok, which they don't, and the gap survives across most demographic cuts.
Pew also separates parents' perception of their teen's screen time from the teens' own. The two views diverge meaningfully, parents are roughly 16 points more likely than their TikTok-using teen to call the time spent on the app excessive. That perception gap sits beneath every "is this app good for my child" conversation a UK parent is currently having, and that conversation is what household-facing brand-safety policies and creator briefs are increasingly built around.
What this means for UK marketers
For UK brands marketing into family households, kids' products, school-age services, family-skewing food and drink, family travel, household budget categories, three operational points from this data, all relevant to digital marketing planning and creative direction.
Instagram is the platform parents tolerate, TikTok is the one they don't. Roughly six-in-ten parents are comfortable with their teen using Instagram; only half say the same of TikTok or Snapchat, and among parents whose teen isn't on TikTok, 73% would be uncomfortable if they joined. Most agencies still treat "Meta" and "TikTok" as fungible reach buys for under-18 audiences. In parents' eyes they aren't. If your campaign relies on parent approval, or simply on the parent not vetoing the purchase the teen is asking for, the platform mix matters before the creative does. Weight Meta paid social heavier than TikTok for family-skewed verticals, and run TikTok activity through a tighter brand-safety filter.
The parent–teen screen-time gap is a customer-journey insight. Parents over-index on perceiving their teen's TikTok use as excessive, 44% call it too much, against 28% of the teens themselves. That gap is where Online Safety Act discourse, "is your child spending too much time on TikTok?" parenting content, and PSHE curricula all live. Family-targeted brands running mid- and lower-funnel campaigns should assume the parent looking at the ad has just been told (by Pew, Ofcom, school) that they should be worried. Lean into transparency on app integrations, screen-time controls, and any "real-world" or "off-screen" angle in the value proposition.
85% of parents discuss social-media use with their teen. That household conversation is what your brand is sitting next to. For purchase decisions where the parent holds the wallet but the teen drives the want, fashion, gaming, beauty, fitness, food delivery, subscriptions, messaging has to survive a sceptical adult re-read after the teen has scrolled past it. Generic influencer activations that read fine to a 15-year-old can read very differently when the parent looks over the shoulder. UK brands should additionally pressure-test child-facing creative against the ASA's CAP Code rules on advertising to under-18s, the data here is the consumer-sentiment evidence supporting why those rules matter to parents.
One angle the headline numbers under-read: the income split. Higher-income parents are materially more likely to call their teen's TikTok use excessive (~50% vs 36%) and to flag productivity damage (41% vs 29%). For brands skewed to ABC1 households, the parent population is more activated and more interventionist than the all-parents average suggests, which makes "family-positive" creative positioning a sharper differentiator in that segment than it would be for a mass-market brief.
How they got the data
Pew's data partner Ipsos recruited the sample from its KnowledgePanel, a probability-based, address-recruited online panel of US residents, surveying 1,458 US teens aged 13-17 and one of each teen's parents between 25 September and 9 October 2025. Each teen and parent completed their own questionnaire. The overall margin of error is ±3.3 percentage points for both groups; subgroup margins (income bands, gender, race) are larger. The research was reviewed by an external institutional review board (Advarra).
Findings are weighted to represent all US 13-17 year-olds living with their parents, and all US parents of teens in that age range. The income breakdowns reported here are at the household level, split at the $75,000/year threshold. Pew's analysis is cross-sectional, so it does not attempt to infer causation from differences between subgroups, "higher-income parents are more likely to say X" is a correlation, not evidence that income causes the perception.
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From Pew Research Center · published 15/04/2026