There’s one New Year’s resolution that millennials wish their boomer parents would make – and it’s to put their phones down. Forget the stereotype of the screen-addicted teen scrolling their way through lunch. For every over-60 who doesn’t know how to send a text, there are plenty who have embraced their devices with such fervour that it is ruining family get-togethers.
It’s been a major gripe among friends in our post-Christmas debriefs, as we all saw our parents’ and relatives’ tech habits up close.
One friend tells me: “My 77-year-old dad has his phone notifications on so loudly that the ping reverberates around the house. The family is invited into a discussion about who might have texted him. It’s an entire saga. Then there’s the Facebook videos that he plays on his iPad at full volume whilst we are chatting or, worse, watching TV. He is worse than people on public transport without headphones.”
A 37-year-old tells me he’s exhausted by his retired mum’s phone use. “She – as parents have the right to do – always says she knows best and isn’t at all addicted to her phone. But she will watch 12 cat videos, play Candy Crush, respond to 19 WhatsApps, video my toddler’s every move, post rants on Facebook and send me a barrage of fake AI-generated news as proof that the world has gone to hell in a handcart.”
A colleague reports that when she and her siblings are with their dad, he will tag them all on Facebook and write heartfelt messages to signal to online friends they’re together – “but not say more than two actual words to us in person.”
This Christmas, Sarah, a teacher from London, went home to visit her parents in Wiltshire. “While on a dog walk with my mum (69), I was literally mid-sentence, when her phone pinged, and she stopped, took the phone out and started WhatsApping. I assumed it must be urgent.
“I said, ‘what’s up, mum?’ and she said, ‘I’m just texting Elaine back about how Christmas is going.’ Elaine is a friend from her book group… who was with her own family, presumably also interrupting her daughter mid-sentence. I just stood there with the dogs like an idiot while she casually caught up.”
The notion of over-60s being the worst screen-time addicts isn’t just anecdotal grumbling from their offspring. Ofcom found that in 2024 Britons over 65 spent more than three hours a day online on smartphones, computers and tablets. In 2019, the Pew Research Center found that people 60 and older in the US “now spend more than half of their daily leisure time, four hours and 16 minutes, in front of screens,” many watching online videos.
Of course, part of this can be explained by the fact that modern life relies so heavily on digital communication – from parking, to shopping to banking – and if an older person has embraced technology, they will likely have an easier time of it. And as millennials themselves know, not all screen time is the same. Playing online Scrabble with friends is going to be better for the brain, social ties, and emotional wellbeing than doomscrolling TikTok.
Research from 2025 on 400,000 older adults found that over-50s who routinely used digital devices had lower rates of cognitive decline than those who used them less. Besides, unlike children and teenagers, whose brains are still forming, boomers have spent years slogging away reading books, phoning their friends on landlines, and looking things up in encyclopaedias – so their time is, in a sense, theirs to waste as they wish. It’s not up to their children to dictate, is it?
Except that just as our parents worried about us and our playing too much Snake or The Sims on our desktop computers aged 13, it’s now our time to worry about them. We’re all addicted to our phones, but younger generations seem more painfully aware of the harm, with parents of young children panicking about rotting their brains before they’ve even read The Gruffalo.
Millennials are – on the whole – becoming better at putting their phones away when it counts. A wedding planner recently wrote on a forum about this topic; “I can confirm that boomers’ phones are attached to their hands throughout the day. Any dancing photo, hugging photo, group photos, it’s the boomers with their phones. In the ceremony, boomers are the only ones with their phones out, standing in the aisles. I’ve been doing this for 12 years, the last four have gotten significantly worse. The under-40 crowd – some, not all – go out of their way to not have phones out and be present.”
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The truth is that boomers can’t win – millennials don’t want to spend all their time showing them how to turn on a computer, but they also don’t want their parents to become drooling, slack-jawed phone-scrollers.
Waging inter-generational wars about phone use certainly won’t help, and everyone has their own nuanced and specific relationship to their device. So how can a frustrated millennial broach phone use with their parents, without seeming patronising or rude?
“One way would be to vocalise how it impacts you and those around you,” says Dr Sheri Jacobson, a retired psychotherapist and founder of HarleyTherapy.co.uk. “Bring it up at a time when the parent isn’t engaged in that behaviour, because concentration is probably impacted when they’re on their phones. You could say, for example, ‘Mum, Dad, you know I care about you and love you and I hope you won’t take offense at me raising this but when you’re on your phone a lot, we sometimes feel a little bit left out.
“We wondered if over dinner, you could put your phone away, because it would make us feel much more connected to you.’ You could also acknowledge that you know you spend time on your phone, too, so you understand the pull.”
Dr Jacobson has found that because phones can be hugely useful parts of daily life, and are in many ways an interface we rely entirely upon, they are also very compulsive. “It is very compelling to attend to notifications” she says, “because the phones are designed to maximise our engagement, and its everything is designed for us to be able to scroll ad infinitum. These are deliberate tactics by the companies to serve us more ads and increase their revenue, and over-60s, I would say, might be less experimental with different settings and they may find it more confusing to try and limit those notifications.
“My colleagues work with clients and for some older people, a lot of it is about refining these notifications, minimising, turning them off – you don’t need a banking app to let you know that you’ve just made a transaction but you might need to know if you’re about to go overdrawn. So it’s about taking time to set these up in a way that is an aid rather than a distraction.”
Jacobson also suspects another reason older people might appear more distracted when their phone buzzes. “One of the qualities of people in their more mature years can be loyalty, a duty, that if a friend messages, or they are alerted to a news event, that they need to act, that they are responsible and sensible.”
In the end, though, all of this gives millennials something that they very much enjoy – the moral high ground. They can look at their dad scrolling TikTok during the Sunday roast, and raise their eyebrows. Or tut as their mum laughs at a comment Elaine made on her Facebook page. Millennials can sit smugly, their phones in their pockets for a whole five minutes, and say: “Come on, Mum and Dad, can’t we just be in the moment?”.
Four of the worst boomer phone habits
As it’s a new year, and it’s a time for change, I asked fellow millennials for the main pleas they have for their boomer parents.
1. Don’t have your notifications on at top volume so that every time someone likes your Facebook photo, the noise gives me a heart attack.
2. If I’m telling you about my existential crisis or heartbreak, please don’t get up mid-sentence to WhatsApp a fun meme to your friend.
3. Don’t send me AI-generated fake news you’ve read or seen online as if they’re true, when they’re clearly entirely made up.
4. Stop filming me eating lunch and taking a million photos of my child while they’re on the potty, or having a tantrum – and then don’t post them to Facebook while we’re sitting right next to you.
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