Study: Most Mealtime Screen Time Is TV, Not Social Media |
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Study: Most Mealtime Screen Time Is TV, Not Social Media
What a new study of mealtime screen time does—and does not—say.
Elizabeth Nolan Brown | 8.24.2026 12:33 PM
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(V2 Photo: Asaliro/Dreamstime. Illustration: Fatima Ruiz/Midjourney.)
Everyone has seen them out at restaurants: the "iPad babies" and zoned-out families. Parents letting their children, some quite young, stare at phones or tablets throughout the meal, sometimes while mom and dad also look at screens.
It's easy to judge those families, though I try to remind myself that we, as casual onlookers, never know the full story. Maybe this almost never happens but tonight the parent has a crucial work deadline. Maybe it's been that rare kind of extraordinarily stressful day. Maybe that boy has developmental issues and this is the only way he can get through a restaurant meal, which the family needs to do because they're traveling. Maybe, whatever the reason, this is an anomaly and not the mealtime norm.
But screen time during meals may be the norm for many families, according to some new research published in JAMA Pediatrics.
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Hold up, though—before you call in Jonathan Haidt (or Josh Hawley, or Jean Twenge, or whoever your favorite tech-panic evangelist might be), take a closer look at what sorts of screens that kids are using. The most common form of mealtime media consumption for kids in this study was "watching content on a large-screen device." That is, a TV, or something akin to a TV.
In the study, a team of University of Arizona communications professors obtained data from 357 American parents. To be included in the study, parents had to have at least one child who's 4–10 years old and had to live with that child at least 75 percent of the time. These parents were asked to recall their most recent family meal and report on whether they and one of their children (for some reason, the study did not ask about all children) had consumed any media and, if so, what kind.
The vast majority of parents—77.6 percent—said they had had a helping of some sort of media during their most recent family meal. And so, too, did nearly 69 percent of the children included in the study.
This conjures up the classic restaurant-judgement fodder: a family all hunched over individual phones and tablets. But for the children, the most common type of screen time was watching something on a "large screen device," generally together with a parent. This was something done by 50.4........