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My almost-15-year-old said something a few weeks ago that I’ve been perseverating on ever since.
“I really wish we didn’t have phones. It’s great to be able to make plans easy and stuff, but I kind of wish it was more like when you grew up.”
She’s a smartphone native, like every kid she knows. She’s had her own since she was 11, earlier than I’d planned, though when you’re a kid who bops back and forth between two houses, a phone stops being a luxury and starts being logistics. Ours as much as hers.
She’s always been unusually good at knowing when to stop. At three, she’d occasionally decline a trip to story time at the library because she was “too tiwerd” and would rather nap. In elementary school, she’d disappear into some craft project without anyone suggesting it. During the Covid years I’d say things like, “I’m getting on a Zoom call, just don’t stab yourself with that X-Acto knife until I’m done, okay?”
These days she keeps tabs on her friends through Snap Maps and thumbs through TikToks, some of which arrive back at me in the form of cottage cheese toast with roasted tomatoes and balsamic glaze, hand-delivered. So it isn’t all bad. But her comment kicked up a feeling I can only describe as grief.
I know what she’s picturing, or thinks she’s picturing. Choreographing dances in a friend’s bedroom until all hours, for an audience of no one. Wandering the mall with only the friends you arrived with, blissfully unaware of what anyone else was doing or who was leaving you out. Passing notes, disposable cameras, an afternoon lost to a stack of Seventeen magazines.
It’s painful enough to feel nostalgic for your own past. It’s a different kind of ache to watch your kid feel nostalgic for an era she’ll never get to have.
What the new Girl Scouts screen time data actually found
Girl Scouts of the USA recently released State of the Girl 2026, a national report on what it actually feels like to be a girl in America right now. Buried in the section on technology is a line about how this generation, at times, longs for “an analog life they never lived.”
That’s my kid. That’s her whole comment, compressed into seven words by researchers who have never met her.
What the report found: girls ages 5 to 13
- 65% say they enjoy being creative more than watching TV or using a device
- 59% say the same about going outside and playing
- 59% say the same about spending time with family
- Nearly 7 in 10 report feeling lonely, and the number rises with age: 64% at ages 5 to 7, 67% at ages 8 to 10, and 73% at ages 11 to 13
Source: Girl Scouts of the USA, State of the Girl 2026
The report’s finding is that girls are not choosing screens over everything else so much as choosing what’s in front of them. When GSUSA asked girls ages 5 to 13 which activities they enjoy more than watching TV or using a phone, tablet or computer, 65% picked being creative. Fifty-nine percent picked going outside and playing. Another 59% picked spending time with family.
I asked Sarah Keating, Vice President of Girl and Volunteer Experience at GSUSA, how that question was actually posed, because framing matters. Girls chose from a set of options that included being creative, going outside, family time, exploring and learning, plus a none-of-the-above.
“In a time where we know screentime addiction is prevalent, we wanted to hone in on where girls were allocating their time, if not on a screen,” Keating told me. “These findings show that there’s so much more curiosity than one may think in this younger generation.”
The number I keep returning to, though, is a different one. A whopping seventy percent of girls report often feeling lonely.
Why girls reach for screens, according to the research
Every parent I know has watched their kid reach for a phone and read it as a verdict. She’d rather be on that thing than be with us. She’d rather scroll than draw. The reach feels like a referendum on everything you offered instead.
Keating pushed back on that read.
“When a girl reaches for a screen, it is usually a matter of convenience rather than true preference,” she said. “Online platforms are an easy way to connect with friends and stay distracted, but our data shows that’s not always what girls prefer.”
Convenience is the operative word, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t guilty of defaulting to it myself as well. The phone is the fastest available answer to boredom, to loneliness, to an afternoon with nothing on the calendar. It isn’t competing with the pottery class or the woods behind the house or the friend three neighborhoods over. If it’s competing with nothing, the phone wins every time.
This reframes the question most of us are asking. Less what do I take away, more what am I putting within reach.
“Because most girls turn to screens out of boredom, extracurricular activities like Girl Scouts programming play such an important role in managing screen time,” Keating said. “Extracurriculars are often framed as optional when they are actually essential to how girls develop confidence, community, and a sense of who they are.”
She named the real constraint too, which is access. Families need models that are flexible and close by, in schools and neighborhoods, rather than one-size-fits-all programming that assumes a parent with a free afternoon and a car.
Girls as digital creators, not just consumers
There’s a second thread in the report that complicates the tidy version of this story, and I think it’s the more useful one.
Girls aren’t only absorbing the digital world. Far from passive consumers, they’re becoming creators as well, making real things inside it. They’re building a shared language out of emojis and slang and inside jokes. They’re forming real friendships in group chats. Keating described girls “designing their own games on Roblox, teaching themselves how to make digital art, and using cookie sale money to buy a 3-D printer to create wheelchairs for kids in need.”
“They can learn and recreate with technology in ways that school doesn’t always allow for,” she said.
I recognize my own kid in that. She’s a natural artist, the kind who will spend three hours getting one colored pencil gradient right and then swear off watercolor for a month in frustration. A good amount of what she’s learned about technique came off a screen. The phone that worries me is also the studio where she found her teachers.
Both things are true, and I’ve stopped trying to resolve them.
What parents can do about screen time instead of taking the phone
I don’t think the answer for my daughter is a dumber phone or a stricter app timer, though we’ve tried both. What I’ve taken from the report is narrower and, for me, more actionable.
Take the wish seriously. When she says she wishes it were more like when I grew up, that’s an invitation to help make it so. She’s telling me what she wants and can’t build for herself, and it deserves a response better than sympathy.
Make the alternative easy. Not aspirational, easy. Art supplies she doesn’t have to ask for. Rides offered before they’re requested. A standing something on the calendar with actual humans in it. Convenience is the whole game, and right now the phone is winning on logistics.
Read the loneliness underneath. Seventy percent is not a screen problem with a screen solution. Girls are reaching for connection with the only tool that’s reliably in the room.
And then the uncomfortable one. Go first.
Somewhere in the middle of worrying about her phone I had to admit that she learned most of what she knows about phones from watching me. I am the one who taught her that a lull is something you fill. That the appropriate response to five unstructured minutes is to reach for a rectangle.
So I’m working on it, badly and inconsistently. It looks like bringing an actual book to the beach and reading it instead of scrolling Instagram under an umbrella. It looks like sitting at the table for a few minutes after everyone else scatters, hands empty, instead of grabbing my phone the second dinner is over. It looks like texting a friend to ask if she wants to take a walk, which is a notable amount of effort compared to just liking her post, and which is also the only version that really counts if the friendship actually matters.
None of this is virtuous. I don’t love it. But I can’t ask her to do better if I’m not a reliable role model. And I’d rather struggle than be a flat out hypocrite.
The thing about grief
My daughter is going to grow up in the world she was born into. She’ll never choreograph a dance in a friend’s bedroom with no one watching, because someone is always watching now, and she knows it. That’s a real loss and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
But she also told me she wished it were different, which means she can see it. She has a sense of what she’s missing and enough clarity to name it out loud to her mother. The report calls this a gap between girls and the environments meant to support them, which is a researcher’s way of saying the girls are fine and the world around them needs work.
She isn’t waiting to be rescued from her phone. She’s waiting for something better to be within reach.
That part is mine to help build.
