What Are You Doing With Your Phone?: How Social Class Frames Parent-Teen Tensions around Teens’ Smartphone Use

Social class contexts shape parents’ guiding principles around teens’ smartphone use. These contexts can affect how parents coach and censor their teens’ smartphone use and can create tensions in the home. Through 174 interviews (87 parent-teen dyads), we find that upper-middle-class families generally adopt an orientation toward scaffolded achievements and working-class families tend to embrace an orientation toward empowered self-sufficiency. We further find that these class-based orientations contribute to parent-teen tensions. For upper-middle-class families, tensions arise when parents insist that teens should use smartphones to get help with academic and enrichment activities and teens disagree about whether their phone-related activities align with this goal. In contrast, we find that conflict can occur in working-class families when teens use their smartphones to get assistance and parents interpret such activity as teens being lazy or not self-sufficient. These findings highlight the role of social class contexts in shaping families’ orientations toward teens’ smartphone use and phone-related tensions.