How Tech Companies Rig Parental Guilt

Platforms profit from children’s attention while parents absorb the blame

Source: Shutterstock. Managing children’s media use has become a daily source of stress and guilt for many families.

Talita Pruett, a California mom of three children ages 14, 13, and 5, is doing everything she can to be a present, involved parent. But one issue weighs on her more than anything else: guilt over media.

She has tried it all: screen-time limits, content filters, charging phones in her bedroom at night, and regular conversations about healthy media habits. Still, she says, guilt lingers, both about her children’s media use and her own.

At first, the family had a strict rule: no phones until age 16. But when Talita’s oldest started high school, the rule proved impossible to maintain — all of her daughter’s peers had smartphones, so she reluctantly agreed to let her have one as well. Within weeks, she noticed her daughter’s grades slipping and wondered if she had made a mistake.

With her middle child, Talita questions whether she has been too strict about screentime rules, even though he already shows some warning signs of media struggles. And then there’s her youngest. Talita says she feels the most guilt about her five-year-old, who uses far more media than her older children did at the same age.

“Sometimes I feel like a complete failure as a parent when I try to help them manage their screen use. It truly feels impossible,” Talita said. “I feel guilty that I might be doing too much. ... And then I feel guilty that I’m not doing enough. We have limits in place and are doing our best, but I still feel so guilty all the time,” she confessed.

Talita is not alone — worry and guilt over children’s media use has become an everyday part of being a parent. New data from the United States collected by one of us (Coyne) in a paper currently under review shows that about half of parents feel guilty about the amount of time their children spend on media. About half also agree with the statement, “I often worry I am not as good at parenting my child around media as I should.”

Widespread parental guilt is an underappreciated cost of the new technological landscape — another societal harm to lay at the feet of tech giants. These tech companies do not act in good faith to help parents, and they actively impede parents from raising their children in the ways they believe is best for their kids’ development.

Guilt by Design

Tech companies’ design choices give them an unfair advantage over parents like Talita who are trying to do what’s best for their children when it comes to media use. This ultimately sets parents up for an endless cycle of guilt. Features like infinite scrolling, autoplay, incessant notifications, FOMO, peer validation, and cheap dopamine hits are just a few of the ways tech companies keep kids engaged. These intentional design choices keep kids online much longer than is healthy — and far longer than many parents would prefer.

And tech companies make a lot of money doing this. A study from Harvard found that social media companies made $11 billion from advertising aimed at children in 2022. Advertisers are willing to cough up this eleven-figure sum because social media platforms extract huge amounts of time and attention from kids.

With so much effort and money directed at hacking children’s attention, it is no wonder most parents experience a wide spectrum of guilt related to their children’s media consumption. Coyne’s data showed that many parents feel guilty about being inconsistent in their parenting or disciplining around media (55%); the amount of time their children spend on media (46%); and putting their own needs regarding media above their children (67%). A majority (57%) worry that they should spend more time with their child instead of on their phone.

Out of Control

The difficulties parents face with setting media and screentime boundaries was highlighted earlier this year in a study by the Family Online Safety Institute, which found that only around half of parents use parental control on tablets, with even fewer using parental controls on other devices. Another study asked parents what they thought about parental controls for gaming. Parents said that such controls “don’t always work as promised, offer little context about how settings affect gameplay, and force binary choices that don’t align with household rules or with children’s maturity levels.”

In short, the parental controls that do exist place a heavy burden on parents. They must learn about different controls across multiple platforms, figure out how to implement them, and monitor the controls to ensure they remain effective, while trying to balance children’s growing autonomy and need for privacy as they enter the teenage years. This would be difficult even if the tech companies wanted wholeheartedly to help parents place reasonable limits on their children’s media consumption, which they do not. Rather than building a dangerous digital highway and then expecting each overworked parent to construct their own guardrails, tech companies could instead be required to build safety features into the products so the digital environment is not so dangerous and addictive in the first place.

Conclusion

You might assume parental guilt is a generational issue, with older parents wringing their hands about new technologies that they struggle to understand. But our research found the exact opposite. Guilt increased as mother’s age decreased (an effect size of -0.10), meaning that younger mothers experienced more guilt, perhaps because they are the first generation to experience it firsthand. They know all too well the ways that new media can affect your self-esteem, concentration, social relationships, and time management, and they want to protect their children from these effects. A recent Harris poll found that clear majorities of parents wish that many social media platforms, including TikTok, X, Instagram, and Facebook were never invented.

What can parents do with their guilt? The first thing to keep in mind is that you are not alone. More than half of the other parents in your neighborhood feel like you do. Guilt is often a sign that something is off, but the fact that so many parents feel guilt over media use means that this isn’t an individual problem for individual families, it’s a problem for our society and our communities. This shared emotion points towards the need to come together to advocate changes in the way technology operates. For your own home, organizations like Children and Screens and Common Sense Media offer evidence-based guidance for how to help children have a healthy relationship with technology.

And finally, give yourself a little grace. Feeling guilty doesn’t necessarily mean you are a failure. In fact, guilt about media use probably means that you pay attention to your child’s media use and know it can be better. This makes you better prepared to support healthy media habits, while also recognizing that sometimes the guilt parents feel is really just a manifestation of the way that technology companies have taken advantage of children’s developing brains, rather than supporting them.

Parents absorb the burden of guilt while tech companies reap the profits. Parents should demand products and media content which are designed to help and support children, not siphon as much time and attention as possible.