A Survey Asked 1,949 Japanese Students How They Use Their Phones
The question was not about hours
The survey did not measure hours per day. It asked whether you think you are addicted to your phone. Nifty Kids ran it from May 26 to July 20, and 1,949 elementary and middle school students answered. The results went up on August 27. Nifty Kids is a Japanese site where children post their worries and answer each other.
The answers split by school level. Among middle schoolers 52.5% said yes, while 63% of elementary schoolers said no. The same question tipped the two grades in opposite directions.
An hour gone without noticing
Those who said yes got a follow up question about when that feeling hits, and they could pick more than one answer. First place went to looking up and realizing the phone had been in your hand for over an hour. Second was putting off homework and the like. Third was watching the screen while doing something else.
The free text answers about why went in different directions. One said that opening the phone once brings in so much at a time that it turns fun. Another said replies on LINE feel like something you have to send right away. Another said videos matched to your taste keep coming on YouTube and social apps. Some wrote that they open the phone when they are bored or feeling low.
Line those up and the common thread is not the length of the session. It is that nothing in it tells you where to stop.
One of them asked to have the charger hidden
The follow up about wanting to stop went only to the students who had called themselves addicted. Within that group, 65.0% of elementary schoolers and 55.0% of middle schoolers picked the answer that means they want to but cannot. The option for actively trying something about it went the other way, with middle schoolers at 29.6%, higher than the younger group.
The report also lists what that looks like in practice. Setting an alarm, turning on screen time limits yourself, keeping the phone out of sight, switching to a plan with a data cap. One respondent made a rule of charging only once a week, ran the battery down to zero on purpose, and had the charger hidden away.
On getting told off or arguing at home about phone use, the most common answer was that it happens sometimes, at 34.0%. Never came next at 30.9%, rarely at 21.3%, and often at 13.9%. Adding those up, about seven in ten have run into it at least once.
The ones without a phone yet
As for who owns a phone of their own, that is 39.7% of elementary schoolers and 75.9% of middle schoolers. The report notes that the middle school figure is up from its 2024 survey. These shares are not a national average. They come from the 1,949 students who answered on that site, and the report adds that 81% of the respondents are girls.
Among those without one, 89.8% said they have wanted a phone of their own at some point. The reasons were wanting to text friends on LINE, wanting to reach someone while out, wanting to look something up right away. Japanese classes and grades run their group chats on LINE, and several answers came from students who cannot join those rooms and lose the thread of what everyone is talking about.
Asked whether a phone is absolutely necessary for life as it is now, 72.6% of elementary schoolers and 80.6% of middle schoolers said it is.
The ending had to come from outside
Put those coping tactics side by side and they share a shape. An alarm, a screen time setting, a spot out of sight, a capped data plan, a charger someone else hid away. Every one of them is an ending installed outside the phone. The apps do not come with a place to stop, so these students went and built one.
Games on DoYouBox come with that place already in them. DoYou Weekday runs ten questions and stops there. Tower gives you three hearts, so a block that misses badly and topples away costs one, and the run closes on the third. The Ultimate Balance Game asks you to pick A or B six times, then hands you the result.