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Social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic requires people to engage in new health behaviors that are public, monitored, and often contested. Parents are typically considered responsible for controlling their children’s behavior and instilling norms. We investigated how parents and teens managed teenagers’ social distancing behaviors. Analyzing longitudinal (2015–2020), dyadic qualitative interviews with teenagers and their parents in 20 families from two middle-class communities in which social distancing was normative, we found that preexisting health lifestyles were used to link social distancing behaviors to specific identities, norms, and understandings of health. The pandemic presented challenges resulting from contradictory threats to health, differing preferences, and conflicting social judgments. Parents responded to challenges by adhering to community norms and enforcing teens’ social distancing behaviors. They drew on preexisting, individualized health lifestyles as cultural tools to justify social distancing messages, emphasizing group distinctions, morality, and worth in ways that perpetuated inequalities. 

The advent of Internet-enabled mobile digital devices has transformed U.S. adolescent technology use over the last decade, yet little is known about how these changes map onto other health-related behaviors. We provide a national profile of how contemporary technology use fits into adolescents’ daily health lifestyles compared with the previous generation, with particular attention to whether and for whom technology use displaces time spent in sleep or physical activity. Time diaries were collected from 11- to 17-year-olds in 2002-2003 ( N = 1,139) and 2014-2016 ( N = 527) through the U.S. Panel Study of Income Dynamics Child Development Supplement. Contemporary adolescents spent 40 minutes more per week in technology-focused activities, but their composition was more varied compared with the earlier cohort. Contemporary technology use was predictive of less time in physical activity, and adolescents who engaged in frequent video game play spent less time in physical activity compared with peers with other technology use profiles.