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Op-Ed: Screen time affects kids’ mental health — What about everything else?

You can’t just tell kids not to use screens. Screens are unavoidable. Stress can be avoided.  

This photo illustration shows the social media platform X (former Twitter) app on a smartphone in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on September 18, 2024
This photo illustration shows the social media platform X (former Twitter) app on a smartphone in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on September 18, 2024 - Copyright AFP/File Allison Joyce
This photo illustration shows the social media platform X (former Twitter) app on a smartphone in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on September 18, 2024 - Copyright AFP/File Allison Joyce

If you’re naïve enough, a headline like screen time affects kids’ mental health causes a simple response: “Of course it does! We didn’t have those gadgets when we were kids in the Triassic, and we turned out fine!”

Indignantly you watch the news to cheer yourself up.

Observant, aren’t you?

A study by UC San Francisco has shown as more or less usual that stress and anxiety and attention issues are associated with screen time in 9 and 10 year olds.  There are a few issues with the way this information is expressed.

The trouble with this very basic statement is that the more likely sources of issues are who and what’s on the screens rather than the screens themselves.

There are actual issues, however, not just the usual and useless kneejerk responses.

For example:

What makes anyone think a bully will stop being a bully just because they’re online?

What’s so great about panning from scene to scene as an aid to focus and attention spans?

How about these idiotic “deep dives” lasting 5 minutes? Good for attention?

The average screen is loaded with distractions. Many of these distractions are moving, like the invaluable useless popups we spend so much time shutting down. Any thoughts?

Then there’s the actual content. Are these kids reacting to content or something else? What’s triggering these horrific responses in such young kids?

Consider also, ye blissful dweller in the cyber–Stone Age, the degree of reassurance you can get by looking at any screen. We currently have a few maniacal wars, poverty, massive social stresses, and imbeciles as heroes, and it’s the screens to blame?

I’d say any negative reaction to these repulsive stimuli was proof of sanity.

It’s a longtime online myth that social media is the cause of massive stress and suicides, and so it is for some people, especially kids. That’s been going on for decades. You’ll no doubt be overjoyed to hear that some entrepreneurs have started selling suicide drugs online.

This myth seems to ignore the fact that negative stresses have to come from somewhere, like other people. The medium isn’t the issue; it’s the people using the medium, directly or indirectly.  

The laws, such as they are and aren’t, aren’t helping. Politics, obsessed with its own infantile tantrums, has never really addressed these decades-long issues, let alone effectively done much about any of it.

There’s a particular part of this UCSF study that does do more than generalize and isn’t written for a mass market. Adolescent depression is one of the more serious and growing issues worldwide.

If you’ve had depression (I have) you’ll know it doesn’t take much to set it off. You may not even know what set it off. Exposure to an aggressively hostile screen isn’t likely to help a kid or an adult. That wide range of potential internal negative stimuli can have a picnic with that environment.

Let’s try some basic epidemiology, rather than just relying on neuroscience. The frame of reference for study needs to be expanded. Is there an epidemiological profile reliable enough to define the common factors and use to prevent these disasters?

Most importantly, in fact critically, how do you make a distinction between a kid having a truly lousy childhood and screen-inflicted damage?  Or is it both?

The point here is that there must be more elements in play than something you can simply turn off. You can’t just turn off a traumatic experience. The screen-based damage is quite likely to be acting in context with other issues.

It’s not like all kids are living some sort of blissful existence in the sewer sometimes referred to as Earth. The problem has to be more than just interactions with a screen.

The practical support for a kid has to be case-specific anyway. Common elements are often the clues to an actual fix for general issues. So far, the commonalities are ages, environments, and types of negative stimuli.  

Hardly surprising, but kid culture is pretty visible and can be turned into useful data for study. It can’t be a coincidence that the same environment produces the same outcomes, fair enough.

The question is what’s pushing so many of the same buttons in so many kids?

This is almost a marketing exercise. Demographic X responds to Stimulus Y. It’s very basic psychology. There have to be multiple common factors. Peer groups online, for example, are notorious sources of pressure on individuals.

I doubt if it’s quite that easy, but in some cases distancing oneself from the source(s) of stress may be enough. You can’t just tell kids not to use screens. Screens are unavoidable. Stress can be avoided.  

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Disclaimer
The opinions expressed in this Op-Ed are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Digital Journal or its members.

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Editor-at-Large based in Sydney, Australia.

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