Digital Media and Parenthood Desires During COVID-19: How Pandemic Contexts Reconfigured Associations Among American Youth

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted late adolescent life in the United States, sharply constraining in-person schooling and social activities while making digital media a primary avenue for coping and connection. Using nationally representative data from six waves of Monitoring the Future (2018–2023; N = 6,698 high school seniors ages 17–18), this study examines whether associations between leisure-oriented digital media use and parenthood desires, interpreted as broad family-formation schemas rather than concrete intentions, shifted between the pre-pandemic period (2018–2020) and the pandemic period (2021–2023), and whether these shifts were patterned by gender. Survey-weighted multinomial logistic regression models estimated for each media type are summarized using average marginal effects. Weekend screen time became more negatively associated with desiring one or more children among young men (period-contrast AME = − 0.036, p < .001), whereas gaming hours became more positively associated with preferring childlessness among young women (period-contrast AME = 0.015, p < .05); weekday screen time showed no systematic changes. Sensitivity analyses confirm these patterns are robust to alternative outcome codings, media specifications, and control sets. The findings suggest that media–parenthood associations are context dependent rather than fixed, and that major social disruptions can reconfigure how everyday media practices align with family-formation schemas through distinct, gendered pathways.