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| Girls, especially, suffer from tech dis-ease. Photo by Julia M Cameron, from Pexels |
Research published in The Lancet found detrimental mental health impacts start after two hours of screen use for girls and after four hours for boys.
Screen use included television, video games and social media, but excluded screen time for school study.
The research involved more than 577,000 children aged between 11 and 15 from 42 high-income countries, and it was conducted well before the pandemic altered our lifestyles. The last sample for the study is from 2014, so the impact of screen time on adolescents is likely to have become more pronounced since the early days of social media.
The study's lead author, Dr Asad Khan, from Australia's University of Queensland School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, said they measured life satisfaction and "psychosomatic" health, being where physical illness or other condition is caused or aggravated by a mental factor.
Khan said of the team's findings:
What we found was that mental health is a big issue. We have also started seeing evidence coming through the scientific literature that overuse of screen time for recreation is also causing some issues in academic achievement, attention and other psychosocial problems like attention deficiency disorder syndrome.
We have also seen that it is linked with depression and anxiety in this particular paediatric population.
As to why negative mental health impacts kicked in after four hours of screen time for boys, but within half that time for girls, Khan said boys are generally more active with their screen time.
Boys are doing more of active screen time for computer, electronic games, whereas girls are not doing that.
Girls' [active] contribution is really low compared to the boys, so that may be why the passive screen time, which is television and social media, are the dominant component of the girls' screen time.
The study's summary states:
Mental wellbeing in adolescents has declined considerably during past decades, making the identification of modifiable risk factors important.
Detrimental associations between screen time and mental well-being started when screen time exceeded one hour per day, whereas increases in physical activity levels were beneficially ... associated with well-being.
Screen time levels were negatively associated with life satisfaction and positively associated with psychosomatic complaints in a dose-dependent manner. Physical activity levels were positively associated with life satisfaction and negatively associated with psychosomatic complaints in a dose-dependent manner.
That means the more screen time, the worse is youngsters' feeling of well-being, and the more physical activity taken, the better youngsters feel.
The study's conclusion is:
Public health strategies to promote adolescents' mental well-being should aim to decrease screen time and increase physical activity.
That goes for parents' strategies as well!
The Australian recommendations for parents is limiting electronic screen use to a maximum of two hours a day and encouraging physical activity of at least one hour a day for both boys and girls.
Khan said one hour of physical activity and no more than two hours of screen time a day provided "optimal mental well-being".
We need to recalibrate our kids' behaviour towards a healthier lifestyle, meaning that when we can, [we should] replace the screen time with some outdoor activity.
Targeting both behaviours simultaneously is likely to give us the best benefit.
We are urging parents to actually minimise screen time as well as maximise the physical activity so we could give a better life to our kids.
The data was collected long before the COVID-19 pandemic where dramatic reductions in physical activity and increases in screen time have been observed globally.
...This is a wake-up call for us as parents, as a community, or as a society to look into this and try to help our kids to do more physical activity, to move more and sit less on a screen.
We need to invest in this if we want to see a healthier lifestyle for our kids in the future.
These findings confirm those of a study published late last year in which excessive screen time for young children under five years was found to be more often associated with poor cognitive outcomes, understandable because at that age they're developing cognitive abilities like language.
In adolescents, there was more association between mental health outcomes like depression and anxiety.
This second study focused on the benefits to children of getting some "green-time", concluding:
Nature may be an under-utilised public health resource for youth psychological well-being in a high-tech era.
Additional guidance for parents is given in response to both these findings by clinical psychotherapist Victoria Matthews, who works with teenagers and children at her Queensland practice. She urges parents to show their adolescents understanding and compassion.
[Children] stay home, they do their homework, but the socialisation that would happen in person is now online.
It used to be all about peer pressure, but now it's 'FOMO', or fear of missing out. What they fear missing out on is the conversation going past them and them not being involved in it.
It becomes a source of distress for them, because what we're not appreciating is that that's how they now socialise — and we've done that to them.
We do have to come out with some compassion and say, 'We've actually created the situation because we've deprived them of the ability to go out.'
Therefore, sports and other club activities are important for young people to get away from their screens but also have that chance to participate in a variety of "conversations" with peers. Matthews says this gives young people opportunity to build a variety of friendship groups.
They're getting their self-esteem built from interacting with people in multiple environments, not just one. Whereas now they go to school and they're still dealing with all that stuff until 9 o'clock at night.
Without that extra interaction, some may come home and head straight for a screen:
They come home, they lie on the bed, and they're just swiping, swiping, messaging, and swiping. [However,] we can't live a life without tech — we just can't.
If that is the case, then it is because the older generation/s and the self-interested corporate influencers have created the wired world the young generation finds itself in.
Therefore, these same confederates must create a fresh environment to preserve the well-being of the young. It's a serious responsibility that parents, as central figures in the core cell of society, have to accept, starting with the task of forging strong connections with their children so that family standards are set, and constructive habits formed from the youngest years. Parents also have to be the role model.
See other posts on this topic here, here and here.
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