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Growing up on TikTok
"It's just a bit of fun."
"It's how kids connect these days, how they learn about the world, how they express themselves and engage. Children have a right to social media as long as we remove the harmful bits."
But have you actually looked?
Here's one minute. Now imagine three hours.
TikTok is a big part of childhood
TikTok is one of the most popular social media apps used by children today. Of the hundreds of children we meet every year, a large proportion of them spend several hours a day on TikTok. That’s hundreds or even thousands of videos, every day.
When TikTok first rocketed in popularity during the Covid-19 lockdowns, many children reported regularly seeing shocking and upsetting content. In the past couple of years, it is true that for most children, we see a lot less explicitly harmful content on their feeds . Fewer self-harm scars, less violence, minimal explicit nudity.
But connection? In this report, we show that on TikTok, children spend almost all of their time passively scrolling and consuming. It’s rare for a post by a friend to pop up in the feed. Interaction with people they actually know makes up a very small proportion of time spent on the platform — and even then, it is often limited to lightweight exchanges, such as sending thumbs-up emojis to maintain ‘streaks’.
Children are learning about the world on TikTok. This report shows what world they’re seeing: feeds are made up of a targeted reflection of what commercial actors think will capture their attention. That includes posts about sports they’re interested in or bands they like. It also includes gambling adverts, Only Fans actors promoting their channels, beauty influencers selling makeup.
A bit of fun? For many children in this research it’s hours a day, thousands of videos a week, it’s during the school day and it’s at 3am. Children say it’s entertaining and good for filling time when they’re bored. But they also say they feel tired, guilty or disappointed in themselves afterwards. Children use phrases like “doom scrolling” and “brain rot” to describe what it feels like. They regularly describe feeling out of control, spending longer than they meant to, or even describe themselves as “addicted”.
To understand the impact TikTok has on children, we have to look at it
A handful of platforms are shaping the lives of a generation of children. There is a strange lack of curiosity about something children spend hours a day with. The amount of research or journalism that actually examines what children see and do on them is, relative to the impact, very small. Imagine if we had such little idea of what children watched on TV, or learned at school.
Over the last fifteen years, we’ve worked hard to make children’s online lives more visible. We’ve developed new methodologies to bring to light what they see, where they click, what they post, when, where and how they scroll. In our experience there is nothing that changes how people think about children’s social media use than forcing them to sit through 5 minutes of your average child’s TikTok feed.
This report is an opportunity to see through the eyes of children, and understand TikTok from their perspective.
TikTok is a short-form video-sharing app built around an endless, algorithmically personalised feed of videos.
These features are not unique to TikTok. Over time, platforms copy each other’s most successful features.
Social media companies primarily make money through exposing users to advertising. They therefore design their platforms to keep users on them for as long as possible.
Features that successfully build usage habits on one platform tend to get copied by others. Streaks — daily reminders that reward users for opening an app consecutively — were introduced by Snapchat in 2016 and have since been adopted by TikTok, Duolingo, Strava and others. Filters and beautifying tools are now near-universal, encouraging people to post more by making it easy to alter their faces and bodies. Stories — posts that disappear after 24 hours — began on Snapchat and spread to Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp.
Scrollable feeds first emerged as far back as 2006, when Facebook launched the ‘News Feed’. But TikTok perfected the combination of an infinite feed with algorithmically selected short-form video. It’s ability to capture and keep user attention was powerful, and quickly duplicated by other companies.
For a detailed breakdown of specific features across all major platforms – and a timeline of how appeared , click here.
When we speak to children and young people about how they use TikTok – and observe them using it in practice – most of their time spent on the app is scrolling the “For You” page.
While TikTok includes features such as group and one-to-one messaging, children and young people more commonly use other platforms – particularly Snapchat – for direct communication.
The vast majority of time spent on TikTok is not social – it’s scrolling.
The data in this report represents the most detailed portrait of a child’s life on TikTok so far
This report collates data collected in 2026 from a range of different methods we use to explore children’s use of digital platforms. Some of these are more technical, others are not beyond the reach of any researcher, policy-maker, or even curious parent.
Each method was designed to investigate TikTok in an entirely balanced way – objectively documenting how children actually use it, and exploring both the positive and negative roles it plays. You can see much more detail on this – the questions asked, stimulus used, analysis conducted – in the methodology annex. This report presents a representative reflection of what we found, with appropriate weighting given according to what we saw and heard.
ConnectLive: xxx snappy heading of what it is
ConnectLive is a research tool, that we developed in partnership with the 5Rights Foundation, which enables us to gather granular usage data of every minute that a child spends on each app on their phone. It also can be used to prompt short surveys so we can measure the impact of a scrolling session on things like wellbeing or cognitive performance.
In this report: Data from a pilot study of ConnectLive conducted in January 2026 with 21 children across the UK
Data donation
This is available to every TikTok user - simply request your own data (or ask a child to request theirs) and, under GDPR, the platform has to provide you with it (this is true of all social media platforms). This provides you with every single video that has been watched in a given time period, and for how many milliseconds. We can analyse what advertising they’re served, what accounts crop up most often in their feeds, and what grabs their attention the most.
In this report: Data from a small scale test of data donation conducted in xx 2026 with a subset of 7 children from across the UK.
Screen record
We’ve used screen record technology for over ten years to study what social media actually looks like through the eyes of a child. Simply ask a child to flick on their phone’s in-built screen recorder while they’re scrolling TikTok (or, again, any other platform). Obviously you need consent, obviously you need to handle that data incredibly carefully, and obviously children may subtly alter their behaviour knowing that you’ll see (we see lots of kids skip past videos with more adult themes extra quickly, for example).
In this report: Screen record samples collected in xx 2026 with 23 children across the UK
Ethnography and film
These methods are what our company was founded on, and are still the best way of understanding how digital technology fits into the wider picture of a child’s life. Visiting children at home, investing time in exploring and documenting their worlds, hearing them talk about their relationship with social media in their own words and on their own terms.
In this report: Interviews conducted in xx 2026 with a subset of 10 children across the UK
Participants were aged 14–16 and were recruited simply on the basis that they used TikTok. They were not selected because they were unusually high or low users, had experienced specific harms online, or represented extreme cases. They represent a range of backgrounds and demographics, with varying levels of self-reported TikTok use — from less than an hour a day to more than three hours daily. Their experiences align with what we see across the hundreds of other children we meet every year.
This data represents the most richly detailed portraits of children’s lives on TikTok to date. There are of course limitations to what conclusions can be drawn from these small-scale samples, although, and larger-scale work is needed.
It’s hard to stop the infinite scroll
Children are spending hours scrolling and don’t feel in control
ConnectLive data gives us a breakdown of when children use every single app on their phone, down to the second, 24-hours a day.
A typical pattern for a teenager is heavy use of TikTok interspersed with stretches of Snapchat, plus intermitted spells on other social apps like WhatsApp, Instagram, X. Other more functional apps like Google Chrome, Maps, and Spotify also appear. The below is taken from Tom’s phone use on Thursday the 22nd of January 2026.
Most of the 21 children used TikTok alone for an average of over one and a half hours per day. Several averaged more than three hours per day.
Average time spent on TikTok per day (h) for the 21 children who used the ConnectLive research app. Average is based on approx. 3 weeks’ worth of ConnectLive phone usage data.
Analysis of when children use their phones revealed that many were scrolling during the night, impacting their sleep. TikTok was not the only app being used throughout the night, but it was the dominant one. For example, the visual below shows a 24-hour period of phone usage for Joey, 14, on Thursday the 15th January 2026.
Analysis of when children use their phones revealed that many were scrolling during the night, impacting their sleep. TikTok was not the only app being used throughout the night, but it was the dominant one. The visual below shows a 24-hour period of phone usage for Joey, 14.
20 out of 21 children used TikTok during the night, between the hours of 10pm and 7am, as shown in the chart below.
“Because instead of sleeping, sometimes I've just been like scrolling on TikTok. Like the more I scroll, the later it gets.”
Emma, 14
Footnotes!
Additionally, 16 of these children were using their phone between 12am and 6am.
Across the sample, 10% of all time spent on TikTok was between midnight and 6am. For two children, this rose to a quarter of their TikTok usage, during the research period.
DONUTS FOR THE HIGH LATE NIGHT USAGE
Most children said they often found it hard to stop scrolling.
“it's just once I'm on it [TikTok], I'm like in that world instead of a world of my own. It's just kind of… I'll watch one thing, then I want to watch another, then another, and it just keeps going on.”
Liam, 15
“it's a bit brainwashing, if you know what I mean. Because when, like, when you've been on it for so long, if you only want to go on it for 20 minutes or whatever, you could just scroll and then just forget, and then it's like 2 hours later.”
Noah, 14
Several children, unprompted by researchers, said they thought they were ‘addicted’ to scrolling TikTok.
ADDICTION UNPROMPTED VIDEO? as a full? or individual clips of the children?
CHARLIE VIDEO
TOM VIDEO - sleep bit + addiction unprompted
Several children said they think specific features of TikTok make it addictive.
Short form video:
“It’s the constant thing of swiping on a video and they are not long videos, they’re short videos.
So it’s a lot easier to watch [TikTok] than say to sit down and watch a 3 hour movie, whereas we could spend 3 hours watching TikTok but it doesn’t feel like that because we’re not watching one thing…
I’ve fallen victim to it many times I won’t lie, I’ll go on TiKTok and I’ll say oh I’ll only use it for 5 minutes and I’ll be on it for an hour or an hour and 30 or something”
Tom, 15
Infinite scroll:
“there's obviously like so much feed that's on there, so you just scroll through it all and don't realise how, how much time you're spending on it.”
Emma, 14
Algorithmic content selection:
“I guess the videos kind of are made for you. Some of them are. So it's just nice to scroll. Like, I wouldn't scroll on my mum’s TikTok because it's so, like, boring.”
Poppy, 16
You are what you eat
Children say that meaningless content is ‘brainrot’ and that it makes them feel rubbish
Children are viewing hundreds, sometimes thousands of videos every day.
BAR CHART OF USAGE
Most videos are watched for less than 5 seconds.
For example, XXX of the YYY videos that Poppy saw in January 2026 were watched for 5 seconds or less.
HOLD BINS CHART FOR 1 x respondent
All seven children watched at least half of the videos they saw in January 2026 for 5 seconds or less.
“With TikTok, if you get bored, you just keep scrolling”
Poppy, 16
In screen recordings, you can observe children often skipping through videos at high speed. Sometimes they watch videos on double or even triple speed.
Videos form a stream of disconnected, contextless, remixed snippets. Explore 30 seconds scrolling through different children’s TikTok feeds below to see what they see.