Screens are everywhere. It’s very hard to avoid them. However, many health organizations recommend that parents limit the amount of screen time children and adolescents have. First, the health effects of excessive screen time have been well documented. Children who watch TV, computer, phone, and tablet screens a lot don’t exercise much. That leads to some very poor health outcomes, such as obesity. Second, a recent study indicates that there are significant negative psychological effects associated with a lot of screen time.
Psychological research is difficult for many reasons. Whenever you deal with people, you have to try to control for all sorts of variables that affect each subject, and those variables are often significantly different in different subpopulations. In addition, some of outcome measures are subjective, at best. As a result, psychological studies often have conflicting results. However, this one seems to do a good job getting over those hurdles. It contains a lot of subjects (40,337) who were randomly selected, leading to an averaging-out of at least some of the variables. Also, it used the results of the National Survey of Children’s Health (NSCH), which was done in 2016. This survey was given to the people who know the subjects best: their caregivers. It also asks a lot of fairly objective mental health questions, such as whether or not the subject was ever diagnosed with anxiety or depression.
The survey also asked the subjects’ caregivers the following questions:
a) On an average weekday, about how much time does [child’s name] spend in front of a TV watching TV programs, videos, or playing video games?
b) On an average weekday, about how much time does [child’s name] spend with computers, cell phones, handheld video games, and other electronic devices, doing things other than schoolwork?
The researchers added the results of both questions to get the total amount of screen time the subject has each weekday. They then correlated that number to the mental-health-related questions on the survey. The results were rather alarming.