What parent hasn’t tried to wrestle their teenager’s phone away from them? For years, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommended a maximum of two hours’ screen time a day. Any more, it warned, and your child could get obese, sleep deprived and depressed. Research has also linked screen time to increases in risky behaviour, poor GCSE results and aggression. No wonder that screens, particularly iPads and smartphones that can be held under the bedcovers, have become a family battleground.
The solution
According to a study published last week in the journal Psychiatry Quarterly, those battles might be unnecessary. The study analysed data from 6,089 teenagers in the 2013 Youth Risk Behavior Survey in Florida. It asked about screen time, sleep, school grades, family eating patterns, depression, physical activity and risky behaviour such as carrying weapons, fighting at school, having sex while drunk and taking drugs. It found that up to six hours a day of screen time was nothing to worry about. The lead author, Christopher J Ferguson, from the department of psychology at Stetson University in Florida says that the AAP recommendation, which has now been lifted for over five-year-olds, was largely plucked from the air. “Based on this study, as well as another large study by Andrew Przybylski at Oxford, it looks like anything up to about six hours a day is pretty normal, and not associated with even minor negative outcomes,” says Ferguson. “Screens are now pretty much woven into our lives. The whole concept of screen time is really different to what it was 20 years ago.”
So we can perhaps try to relax and remember there have always been panics about whatever young people happen to be obsessed with. “We need only look back through history at Elvis Presley, comic books, Harry Potter, rock music in the 1980s and Dungeons & Dragons,” says Ferguson. “So long as kids are doing OK in school and getting enough sleep and exercise, then – for most of them at least – screen use is not going to have a profound impact. Our lab recently published one study looking at violent media consumption, anxiety and depression, and found no evidence for links.”
However, it is not being overly restrictive to insist your child stops looking at the screen an hour before bed and to keep devices outside the bedroom, or to encourage them to take exercise. It is also important to discuss the risks of social media.
But, all that said, there’s still something about a screen and my teenager glued to it that makes me anxious.
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