I spoke to The Salvation Army Magazine ‘The War Cry’ about the idea of a #ScrollFreeSeptember (screen time restrictions). Here’s the resulting article:
Tag: Screentime
I’ve been really pleased this past week to read a handful of news pieces based on research which shows that the ‘moral panic’ around screen time is largely that. It’s pushed by government, Royalty, and all kinds of ‘leading voices’, but the academic research which studies this presents a very different picture:
Andy Przybylski, associate professor and director of research at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford said studies exploring links between screen time and health sometimes find weak, negative links to aspects of wellbeing such as self-esteem and depression but that the majority were based on surveys and only looked at one snapshot in time.
““The thing that is very very important to understand about this is that these correlations are extremely small,” he said. “And 99% of a child’s wellbeing has nothing measurable to do with screens, no matter how you measure them.”
Przybylski added that while there have been studies that follow children over time, these have generally found that such correlations go away because more of the background of the child is taken into account.
“New good studies, that add to what we understand about the effects of screen time over time on young people – they are really far and few between,” he said.
Dr Pete Etchells, reader in psychology and science communication, Bath Spa University added that the inclusion, for the first time, of “gaming disorder” in the World Health Organisation’s international classification of diseases this week was not backed by evidence.
“It is not necessarily wrong, it is premature,” he said.
and note this, something I’ve said many times – if we’re always immediately jumping to the conclusion that ‘tech is bad’ (and yes, our habits with it could do with looking at), but:
When considering interventions, “if the basic science isn’t good, our solutions can be very costly and not even attain the outcome that we want,” he said.
Read full article in The Guardian.
I also liked what Dr Etchells said on the BBC:
“We’re essentially pathologising a hobby, so what’s next? There are studies on tanning addiction, dance addiction, exercise addiction, but nobody is having a conversation about including them in ICD 11…
“I don’t think policy should be informed by moral panics, which is what it feels like is happening at the moment.”
And I like this from Newsweek:
Experts have sought more substantial evidence for devices’ detriment before WHO officially declared gaming addiction an illness. Developmental psychologist Sue Fletcher-Watson criticized the use of “screen time” as an umbrella term that didn’t differentiate children’s digital activities and noted many older children use the internet to talk with friends or learn more about their world.
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
I’ve been featured on MMU News, as I’ve had my research accepted for use as submitted evidence to a parliamentary inquiry on the impact of social media and screen-use on young people’s health https://bit.ly/2K9osdH :
Today’s presentation at #PremDac17:
I was alerted to this programme about children and screen time, on earlier this week, and have just had the opportunity to catch-up on it. The blurb says:
Getting children away from their screens can be a daily battle, but how much more difficult is it in the school holidays? We’ll be asking whether it matters that they’re attached to their phones, tablets or computer games and whether it’s useful to set boundaries about time spent online. Do you worry that your children are addicted to their screens or are you relaxed about it? Is it any different to time spent in front of the TV, and do you consider what example you might be setting? Jane will be joined by Dr Alicia Blum-Ross who is part of a team at the LSE looking at parenting in a digital age.
I thought it was a really balanced programme, with many of the same concerns that parents always have, but many encouragingly finding ways to manage (e.g. no screen use between 9am and 6pm, looking at the examples they set), and I was pleased to hear Alicia challenge the language of ‘control, addiction’, etc. that many parents were using. Her thoughts were based upon the extensive research that LSE undertakes at Parenting for a Digital Future, whose team includes Prof Sonia Livingstone, who endorsed my book Raising Children in a Digital Age.
