When It Comes To Kids' Mental Health, It's Not The Screens, It's How They Use Them
A new study found that addictive screen use, rather than the duration of screen time, was linked to poorer mental health outcomes.
It’s summer, school is out, and for a lot of kids and parents that means battles about screen time. As caregivers, we worry about our kids spending too much time playing video games or slurping up brainrot on YouTube.But a new study, published last week in JAMA, sheds new light on the nuances of this discussion.
The study — led by Dr. Yunyu Xiao of Weill Cornell Medicine/NewYork-Presbyterian in New York — followed nearly 4,300 children across the U.S. for four years, starting at age 10. Researchers asked the tweens and teens not only how much time they were spending on screens, but how “addictive” they found their screen time, including social media, video games, and generally just being on the phone. What they found was perhaps surprising.
More time spent on screens at age 10 was not associated with higher rates of suicidal behaviors in the early teenaged years. Rather, it was children who found screen use highly or increasingly addictive that showed suicide-related outcomes and worse mental health.
“High or increasing trajectories of addictive use of social media, mobile phones, or video games were common in early adolescents,” the paper concluded. “Both high and increasing addictive screen use trajectories were associated with suicidal behaviors and ideation and worse mental health.”
In other words, a child that can easily put a phone or video game down after being online for hours generally fares better than a child who only spent an hour on screens but found it hard to log off.
That said, nearly one-third of participants had an increasingly addictive use trajectory for social media or mobile phones beginning at age 11 years. (It’s almost like these things are designed to be addictive.) By age 14, the end of the study, children with high or increasingly addictive screen behaviors were between two to three times as likely to have thoughts of suicide or self harm.
“This is the first study to identify that addictive use is important, and is actually the root cause, instead of time,” Xiao told The New York Times.
She notes that this is relevant because, while the answer to this issue may feel intuitive — simply take the phone away — it’s the addictive behavior, not the screens themselves, that are an issue.
“We do not know if just taking away their phone will help,” she says. “Sometimes it can create some conflict in the family, and that is even worse.”
There were limitations to the study: researchers couldn’t definitively assert that addictive use trajectories are the sole or primary cause of poorer mental health outcomes, especially since the study did not take into account “psychosocial and behavioral factors such as bullying, adverse childhood experiences, parental monitoring, sleep disturbances, stress, social isolation, and social determinants of health.”
Additionally, the data was self-reported — which can never be wholly objective — and the period includes the Covid-19 pandemic, which we know had negative effects on adolescent mental health.
Still, the study gives parents and policy-makers new and important considerations when it comes to screen time, focusing more on the behaviors that come from time online, regardless of how much time that might be.
