Managing Technology For Children

When it comes to minors, significant majorities of Americans support government regulation of technology. Eight in 10 say social media companies should be required to disclose how they rank or promote content to minors, and a similar proportion say parental consent should be required to download a social media app. Support is especially strong for requiring age verification for access to pornographic websites, with 62% of Americans saying they strongly support it and a total of 77% in support overall. Support is less strong for social media companies enforcing age restrictions — 35% strongly support — but overall, 70% of Americans still favor this.

There are some differences by age when it comes to support for age restrictions. In general, young people are less supportive of age restrictions on social media and pornography, and women tend to favor restrictions more than men. Yet solid majorities of all demographic and political groups support these restrictions. (See appendix.) A small portion of the population takes no position, but there is no meaningful opposition to any of these potential regulations, indicating an appetite among Americans for government action of some kind to regulate technology for minors. The likelihood of governments enacting such restrictions is a different question, but when it comes to public opinion, many Americans would clearly like to see more protections for minors.

At the same time, levels of parental restriction of content are somewhat lower than support for government restrictions.

Nearly 60% of parents with children at home say they set restrictions on content, leaving more than 40% who don’t. Figures are similar for screen time restrictions, and significantly lower for contact and messaging restrictions. It’s important to note that these numbers are based on parents with children of any age living at home. Those with younger kids may have more restrictions, while those with older kids may have fewer.

We also asked people about their views on rules for smartphones in schools, an issue that has come up in many local school districts. We explored a variety of options, ranging from no smartphones being allowed on campus at any time through smartphones being available at all times.

The most popular policy, supported by about half of Americans, would keep smartphones away during class but available during students’ free time. The second most popular option is a policy of banning smartphones for the entire school day. More stringent options, such as banning smartphones from campus at any time or eliminating all screens from the classroom, are much less popular — and at the other end of the spectrum, a more lenient policy of allowing smartphones at all times is the least popular of all.

Overall, Americans seem to prefer school policies that allow smartphones at least some of the time — either after the school day or outside of classroom instruction — but that eliminate the distraction that phones might create in class. If we add together all of the options that exclude smartphones from classrooms at some level, we see that 90% of Americans do not want smartphones in class.

These basic preferences hold across the political spectrum. Larger percentages of Democrats than Republicans preferred allowing phones during free time, while more Republicans than Democrats preferred banning phones during the school day. But none of the other policy options we offered garnered the support of more than about one in 10 respondents, regardless of partisan leanings. We found no substantial differences in these policy preferences between parents with young children at home and other respondents.

Nearly two-thirds of parents with children under 18 at home express a desire for other parents in their communities to set stricter limits on technology, and half say it would support their own efforts if other parents set clearer limits on screen time. About a third don’t take a position on what other parents do. Few parents disagree with the idea of other parents setting stricter limits.

At the same time, parents don’t often speak with each other about managing kids and technology. Only 13% say they do this frequently, while 55% say they do it occasionally. When asked if they had ever changed screen time rules because of something another parent said or did, only 17% of parents said yes. Among that small group, most (86%) said they made their own rules stricter because of what another parent said or did.

Overall, these figures suggest that the American public, and parents in particular, would like to see collective action on managing technology for minors, whether through government restrictions or community norms. There is a sense that many parents would welcome support in limiting children’s use of technology, and few would oppose such efforts.

METHODOLOGY NOTE

Between August 6-18, 2025, YouGov interviewed 3317 nationally representative respondents who were then matched down to a sample of 3000 to produce the final dataset. The respondents were matched to a sampling frame on gender, age, race, and education. The frame was constructed by stratified sampling from the full 2023 American Community Survey (ACS) one-year sample with selection within strata by weighted sampling with replacements (using the person weights on the public use file).

The matched cases were weighted to the sampling frame using propensity scores. The matched cases and the frame were combined and a logistic regression was estimated for inclusion in the frame. The propensity score function included age, gender, race/ethnicity, years of education, region, and home ownership. The propensity scores were grouped into deciles of the estimated propensity score in the frame and post-stratified according to these deciles.

The weights were then post-stratified on 2020 and 2024 presidential vote choice as well as a four-way stratification of gender, age (four categories), race (four categories), and education (four categories) to produce the final weight. The overall margin of error is +/- 2.1%.