Ask a British parent what worries them about their teenager’s phone habits, and you’ll get some version of the same answer. Too much scrolling. Too much social media. Too much time in bedrooms staring at screens instead of doing homework or seeing friends in person. There’s a strong cultural consensus that the way teenagers use phones is unhealthy, and that older adults, whose phone use looks more restrained from the outside, are handling the same technology in a more balanced way.
The research on how different generations actually reach for their phones tells a more complicated story. The two groups do reach for opposite reasons. But which reason is healthier, on the current evidence, isn’t the one most parents would guess.
What teenagers actually do with their phones
Studies of adolescent phone use consistently find the dominant motivation is social. Teenagers reach for their phones to communicate, whether through text messages, direct messages on social apps, group chats with friends, or short back-and-forth exchanges through the day. In the research literature, this use pattern has a name. It’s called communicative use. In a 2021 systematic literature review of problematic smartphone use published in Computers in Human Behavior, Peter André Busch and Stephen McCarthy synthesized decades of research and found that adolescents and young adults consistently report higher levels of problematic use than older age groups, but that the underlying motivations shaping teenage use are, in most studies, socially oriented rather than mood-regulatory.
The problem, of course, is that teenagers don’t do only communicative use. They also do enormous amounts of the passive kind, and when researchers measure how the average teenager’s time on the phone breaks down, both types are present, often at levels that would strike most adults as concerning. But when the underlying reason for reaching for the phone is asked about directly, teenagers overwhelmingly report the social one. They’re checking on friends. They’re maintaining conversations. They’re monitoring the small daily texture of their social world.
What older adults actually do with their phones
Older adults, on the current research, reach for their phones for different reasons. In a 2021 cross-sectional survey of 154 older adults in Norway published in Computers in Human Behavior, researchers examined the motivations and usage patterns of a population that has adopted smartphones relatively recently. The most common uses among older adults were social media and news reading, not calls to family or practical utilities. The direction of the reaching tended to be inward rather than outward. Older adults used their phones primarily for information consumption and passive engagement rather than active communication.
Related work has looked at what kinds of apps older adults gravitate toward. In a 2025 conference abstract presented at the Gerontological Society of America’s Annual Scientific Meeting by Suyi Wang and Minjie Lu of Beijing Normal University, researchers reported findings from a study of 195 participants aged 18 to 80 on how older and younger adults weigh the emotional versus functional value of smartphone apps. Older adults placed greater emphasis on the emotional value of an app than on its functional utility. Younger adults didn’t show this preference. Older participants preferred apps that felt good, apps that provided a sense of connection or emotional resonance, over apps that were merely useful. The abstract is preliminary research and hasn’t yet been published as a full peer-reviewed paper, but the finding is consistent with the wider literature on socioemotional selectivity in later life.
Put those findings together and a picture emerges. Older adults reach for their phones to feel better. Not usually to talk to someone in particular. Not usually to complete a task. To feel something. To manage a small internal state that has become uncomfortable, or to fill a gap in the day that had once been filled with something else. The channel varies. For some, it’s news. For others, social media. For others, browsing something familiar. What ties the different behaviours together is that the phone functions, for the older user, as a form of mood regulation.
Before the picture gets clearer, it’s worth noticing that the same platforms shaping how teenagers reach for their phones have also, on several documented occasions, shaped what actually happens inside their bodies. In 2021, a strange cluster of tic-like symptoms started spreading through teenage TikTok users faster than any known neurological illness could explain, and researchers are still working out what it tells us about the specific vulnerability of adolescent minds to socially transmitted symptoms.
The panel study across the adult lifespan
The most useful study for understanding what those two motivations produce over time comes from a 2021 panel study of 461 adults published in Behaviour & Information Technology, led by researchers Anja Stevic, Desirée Schmuck, Jörg Matthes and Kathrin Karsay of the University of Vienna. The researchers tracked adults between the ages of 18 and 65 across two waves, distinguishing between communicative smartphone use (exchanging messages with other people) and passive smartphone use (viewing content, scrolling feeds, reading news without interaction). They wanted to see whether the type of use predicted change in wellbeing over time, and whether the effects varied by age.
The finding was clear on one side and surprising on the other. Passive smartphone use showed a significant negative influence on wellbeing across every age group in the sample, irrespective of age. It didn’t matter whether the person was 25 or 60. Passive use hurt. Communicative use, on the other hand, only produced a positive wellbeing effect for the older participants in the study, those over 63, and not for the younger ones. Which is a finding worth sitting with. Reaching out to other people through the phone appears to help older adults more than it helps younger ones, in this sample. Reaching out through the phone appears to be doing genuine psychological work for the people who most need it, and not much either way for the people who have easier access to in-person contact.
The large older-adults study
The most directly relevant study for the article’s central claim was published this year. In a 2026 machine-learning analysis of 2,585 adults aged 60 and older in Guangzhou, China, published in JMIR Aging, researchers Sheng Chen and Yue Song of Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, with senior author Chien-Chung Huang of Rutgers University’s School of Social Work, examined which patterns of smartphone use were linked to depression in older adults. The two central configurations that emerged from their analysis were high smartphone addiction and low preference for interactive use. Older adults who reached for their phones compulsively, and who avoided the interactive features that would have connected them to other people, were reliably more depressed than older adults with the reverse pattern.
In Huang’s own framing, quoted in the Rutgers press release accompanying the study, “It comes down to purposeful interaction versus compulsive escapism. The same device can bridge the gap to loved ones and community or serve as a wall to shut them out.”
Which reason is healthier
Here is where the picture runs counter to intuition. The motivation the teenager brings to the phone, at least in its uncorrupted form, is the healthier one.
Communicative use, the social exchange that dominates teenage phone motivations, is the pattern the Chen study found to be associated with lower depression risk in older adults, and the pattern the Stevic panel found to positively influence wellbeing in the age group who most needed the connection. Passive and mood-regulatory use, which dominates older adult phone motivations, is the pattern both studies found to be corrosive.
This isn’t a claim that teenagers are doing phone use well. They aren’t, in most cases. Their communicative motivation is delivered through platforms designed to keep them scrolling, and the ratio of actual social exchange to passive scrolling often skews heavily toward the passive. The point is subtler than that. The reason a teenager reaches for the phone tends to be a real one. There is an actual person on the other end of the exchange. There is a social need being met, however imperfectly.
The reason an older adult reaches for the phone, on the current evidence, tends to be something else. It tends to be a small uncomfortable feeling looking for a place to land. And the phone, offering an endless supply of stimuli that can absorb the feeling without resolving it, becomes something ill-suited to the job. The mood-regulation motivation isn’t a bad thing in itself. But the phone isn’t a mood-regulation tool. It’s a stimulus-delivery machine, and the older adult who reaches for it looking for relief tends to spend more time with it than intended, and often feels worse afterwards.
I want to be honest that this is a coarse-grained reading. Teenagers and older adults both do plenty of both kinds of phone use, and individual variation within each generation is enormous. What I’m describing is a modal pattern, not a rule about any specific person. And the concerning teenage phone use that dominates headlines and parental worry isn’t a myth. Excessive scrolling, doomscrolling, and social comparison on curated feeds have all been linked to worse mental health outcomes in adolescents, and none of what’s above should be taken as suggesting otherwise. My interpretive claim is that the underlying motivation, the reason the hand reaches for the device in the first place, matters more than the surface behaviour, and that the teenage motivation tends to be the healthier one.
What this means for how the conversation gets framed
The parenting conversation about teenagers and phones has, for the last decade, been dominated by warnings about screen time and social media. Those warnings aren’t wrong. But they tend to obscure the psychological work the phone is doing for the teenager, which is the maintenance of a social world in the developmental years when peer relationships are becoming central to identity.
The conversation about older adults and phones has barely started. Boomer phone use tends to be treated in public discourse as harmless or quaint, with the occasional headline about grandparents falling for misinformation on social media. The research picture, especially with the new Chen study, is more concerning than that. Older adults’ phone use, when it becomes problematic, tends to do so through the pathway Huang described: compulsive escapism rather than purposeful interaction. And that pathway can be as costly as anything a teenager is doing, without the counterweight of a genuine social need underneath it.
You can watch the pattern once you know what to look for. The teenager on the sofa is scrolling, but every few minutes they surface, respond to someone, laugh at something a friend sent, come back to whatever they were watching. The older person in the armchair reads the news, closes the app, opens it again, reads more, closes it, opens it. The teenager is inside a conversation. The older person is inside a loop.
Both look, to someone standing outside, like a person on a phone.
The two aren’t doing the same thing at all.
By Kiran Athar. I write about psychology and human development for a general audience. I am not a psychologist or clinician. What follows is my reading of the research on generational phone use, offered as an interpretation rather than as clinical advice.