Less Than An Hour Of Screentime A Day Can Harm Your Child’s Socioemotional Health
A large study has just been published on the effects of screentime in children and the results are extremely concerning.
Sixteen authors contributed to Electronic Screen Use and Children’s Socioemotional Problems, published by the American Psychological Association this month. The study model is very interesting. It collected research papers that had studied screen use in children in any way, pulled the results of 117 of those studies and then used something called Multivariate analysis to predict the outcome of screen use in children under 18.
The studied data included research from all over the world between 1972 and 2024. American-derived studies comprised the bulk of the study (41), with Canada (13), Australia (11), Germany (7) and the Netherlands (7) coming in behind. A total of 331,391 children were represented through the researched studies – 48.1% were boys and 48.5% were girls, with the mean age reported as 10.4 years.
This study is hugely significant for two reasons:
- The number of children included in the study. The larger a study size, the much more likely statistical analyses are to produce accurate results. Small study sizes are harder to produce statistically significant results than larger ones. With over 300 hundred thousand children included through all the research analyzed, the statistical significance of any reported conclusions are very high.
- The number of years of research collected is – again – very high. It may mean one thing that a report done in 1972 finds that screen time correlates with emotional troubles in children, but to find that same result in a study from 2024 is huge. As in the numbers of children represented in the study, the number of years represented in the study also creates a very high statistical significance that the results are accurately reported.
Therefore, the conclusions from this research are NOT to be ignored. They are, by all accounts, statistically significant thanks to the robust number of children studied over a long period of time.
Please click on the link for the paper’s title to look at the study for yourself. It was very interesting research – a really ingenious way of coming to a conclusion about screens and the behavior of children.
Now, here’s the bottom line.
CHILDREN – PARTICULARLY THOSE FROM AGES 6-10 – WHO USE SCREENS MORE THAN 30 MINUTES A DAY ARE PRONE TO SOCIOEMOTIONAL PROBLEMS such as attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms (48), followed by aggressive behavior (39), emotional problems (37), conduct problems (including oppositional defiant behavior; 30), mental health problems (20), peer relationship problems (19), antisocial behavior (17), and low self-esteem (11).
From the research:
These data suggest that small amounts of screen use are not problematic— there appear to be few differences between outcomes for children watching 10 and 30 min per day. For children exceeding the guidelines, there was a substantial association between their screen use and socioemotional problems. At these levels, more is worse, likely because screens increasingly displace other essential protective behaviors (Roberts et al., 1993; World Health Organization, 2019). As noted earlier, meta-analyses have shown that screen usage is associated with lower levels of physical activity (Kontostoli et al., 2021), poor sleep duration or quality (Carter et al., 2016; Hale & Guan, 2015; Zhang et al., 2022), and reduced in-person social interactions (Twenge et al., 2018). Small increases in screen use are unlikely to displace these behaviors, but once exceeding guidelines, an extra hour of screen use likely means less sleep, social time, or physical activity.
And this goes both ways. From the study:
…children on screens may be at greater risk of developing socioemotional problems, just as children with preexisting socioemotional problems may turn to screens in general as a way to cope with their emotional and social distress.
So, in closing, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, aggressively limit the amount of time your child/children spend on screens. Do NOT allow them to have ANY screens in their bedrooms during the nighttime hours at all – no TVs, no computers, no phones, no pads, no Gameboys, no Nintendos, no NOTHING with a screen.
If you even scan the research, you’ll find that allowing kids to have screens at nighttime contributes to lack of sleep, which in turn – despite what they’re seeing on those screens – causes an inability to control their emotions because they are tired.
I remember when our kids turned 18. Both the boys went out and bought TVs. Our youngest daughter was happy to have her phone 24/7 because she uses her phone for everything in the world, but the boys were ecstatic to have their own TV. Hysterically, only one of them ever really used it much even after an 18 year wait!
Our future resides in our children. Let’s give them – and us – the best future we can. Let’s be the adults in the room and protect our children’s mental health by severely limiting their screen use. Pronto.