Screens and young children
It’s so easy, isn’t it? Sit them down with a screen. Toddlers as young as one will stay there, entranced. Sometimes for hours.
There’s been a lot of research into the impact of screens on children. It can be summed up simply: no screens when they’re little, and be restrictive as they get older.
The American Academy of Pediatrics has taken the view that, under two years of age, kids shouldn’t see screens at all. Later, two hours a day, max.
Their reason? “Because there’s no evidence of benefit, and a lot of concern about harm: because we worry about what screen time may be replacing in the lives of young children, who need direct human interaction to learn and develop.”
This is key. When they’re watching and playing with screens, what are they missing?
The commercial impact
The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, founded by Harvard psychiatrist Dr Susan Linn, has concerns for other reasons:
The rise of ubiquitous, sophisticated, and portable screen technologies allows marketers unprecedented direct access to children. At the same time, key policies and agencies created to protect kids from harmful marketing have been weakened. The result is a commercialised culture causing harm to children…And when children adopt the values that dominate commercial culture—materialism, self-indulgence, conformity, impulse buying, and unthinking brand loyalty—the health of democracy and sustainability of our planet are threatened.
How much time are they spending online?
A striking statistic from Australia demonstrates the habits families are drifting into: 40% of 18-month-old toddlers spend two hours a day watching and playing with screens. In the UK, an Ofcom report found that, on average, preschool children spend more than four hours a day with screens. In early adolescence that number rises to about seven hours a day.
If you have children, or grandchildren, it might be interesting to track their habits and see where their behaviour stacks up in comparison with national averages. Just asking these questions makes us all much more aware of what’s going on.
Dr Linn advises the following around screen-use:
The way to help children flourish in the digital age is to ensure that they develop a solid grounding in, and love for, the analogue world. They need time to form powerfully deep attachments to people and connections with the rest of the natural world. To develop a healthy sense of themselves, children need satisfying experiences unmediated by digital devices. They need to explore with all of their senses, and have chances to become bored enough to generate their own amusements and interests.
But, aside from the impact of commercialism, what other implications might overuse of screens lead to?
Well, according to a report in The Daily Telegraph, the main impact is on speech development and language skills. Too much screen time stunts development in these areas.
It can also affect sleep and brain development. A British study found that every hour infants spent on devices was linked to 16 minutes less sleep.
So what?
Does this mean we should take devices away from little children altogether?
Not necessarily. Jenny Radesky, lead author on the report by American Academy of Pediatrics, does allow her kids to use screens, but she carefully monitors their use.
For example, her children don’t get access to digital media during the week. On Fridays, they have a family movie night – she encourages the use of screen time together with your kids. At weekends, the kids are allowed cartoons, apps and games. But more than just limiting time on these, Radesky talks to her children about the way they react to video games and how they interpret information they find online.
Now, if you’re a parent, I’m not trying to make you feel guilty. Well perhaps I am. Because feelings of guilt are powerful motivators. They may not persuade you to change the way you behave, but they should at least help you sit down and think.
Screens and Teenagers
The stakes are raised when we come to older children, and especially teenagers. The issues are not just their losing sleep or getting outside enough. Teens are getting sucked into complex sets of online relationships, as social media in its many varieties overlays their real-life social circle.
What seems on the surface as a means of giving kids more friends and connections and interests is also having more insidious effects.
Is there cause for alarm?
Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation? asked psychiatrist Jean Twenge recently in an essay in The Atlantic.
Most alarmingly, she claimed that smartphone use could be linked to teen suicide. One of the kids she spoke with is Athena. Athena is 13.
Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people."
Twenge’s big interest is the impact of the smartphone, and she has been focusing on what has happened since it first appeared on the scene.
Around 2012, I noticed abrupt shifts in teen behaviors and emotional states. The gentle slopes of the line graphs became steep mountains and sheer cliffs, and many of the distinctive characteristics of the Millennial generation began to disappear. In all my analyses of generational data—some reaching back to the 1930s—I had never seen anything like it.
Her claim?
the twin rise of the smartphone and social media has caused an earthquake of a magnitude we’ve not seen in a very long time, if ever. There is compelling evidence that the devices we’ve placed in young people’s hands are having profound effects on their lives—and making them seriously unhappy.
She went on to claim a correlation between teen mobile use and anxiety, loneliness, and suicide, although she was criticised by fellow academics who said the evidence wasn’t that great and the correlation was small.
She responded that it was better to be safe than sorry.
Where does this idea come from?
Her case is that the generation born after 1995 became teens just as the smartphone arrived. In the U.S., 50 per cent+ market penetration was achieved in 2011/2012 and this coincided with a big increase in depression and anxiety amongst girls.
Between 2010 and 2015, the number of American teens showing classic symptoms of depression shot up by one-third. Teen suicide attempts jumped 23 per cent, actual suicides by 31 per cent. Twenge admits she can’t prove cause-and-effect but her keystone argument is that the correlation is significant, and because the stakes are so high it should startle us into action.
One UK expert interviewed on a BBC programme exploring Twenge’s theory, is child psychologist Laverne Antronbus. Her take is that, ‘using my head I’m quite worried, but I’m not sure I have the evidence to support the alarm. But…the alarm is real.’
She suggests the Government should take the lead in helping us develop new cultural norms to keep things under control.
The New York Times summed up what the paediatricians are saying:
What we should be emphasising for older children...is that parents need to make sure that they get true non-screen time built into their days. That means, in part, no screens in the bedroom, and cellphones left for the night in a different room. Families need to create a couple of hours of high-quality offline time each day.
To discuss
Raising teenagers is no simple business. Parents know there are no simple formulae for success, though keeping communication open is a core idea. How do mobiles and other screens work in your home? How much focus do church youth efforts have on helping teens think critically and be self-aware in their social media use?
Nigel Cameron is President Emeritus of the Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies (C-PET) in Washington, DC, which he founded in 2007 and led for ten years, and former Technology Editor at UnHerd.com. He was recently Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in Science and Society at the University of Ottawa, Canada.
Buy the Book
Interested in thinking through these issues in more detail? Why not buy yourself a copy of Nigel Cameron's book, "God and my Mobile: Keeping the faith in a digital world."
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