For years, parents have been warned that social media is stealing family time, undermining relationships and replacing meaningful conversations with endless scrolling. But a major new study suggests that one of the most common fears about social media may be overblown. Researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology who tracked nearly 1,000 young people and their parents for a decade found little evidence that increased social media use harms family relationships.
Even when parents or children spent more time checking apps, posting online or using social platforms, family bonds did not appear to deteriorate as a result. The findings, published in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence, challenge a popular assumption that social media is a major driver of family conflict and disconnection. Rather than relying solely on self-reported screen habits, the team also incorporated interviews, observational measures and objective smartphone usage data.
That level of detail matters because previous studies have often found links between social media use and poorer family relationships. But many of those studies were cross-sectional, meaning they captured only a snapshot in time and could not determine whether social media was actually causing family problems. The researchers wanted to test a more difficult question: what happens when a family's social media use increases over time?
Nobakht said the researchers examined 106 possible correlations between social media use and family relationships, but only two remained significant after statistical corrections. Notably, he said both relied on adolescents reporting both measures themselves, suggesting that reporting bias may have influenced findings in some previous studies. Campaigns encouraging families to put phones away during meals and activities are often built around the idea that screen time inevitably displaces meaningful face-to-face interaction.
According to Nobakht, parents may be focusing on the wrong question. He suggested that how, when and where social media is used may matter far more than the amount of time spent on it. Instead of worrying about whether family members spend three hours a day on social media or five, parents may want to pay closer attention to whether phones are interrupting conversations, meals or other important moments together.
N., Wichstrøm, L., & Steinsbekk, S. (2026). Social media use and the quality of family relationships: A six-wave longitudinal study of within-family effects from age 10 to 20. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 55, 1361–1373. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-026-02362-5 Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Kara Dolman and Gray R.
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