More screen time is linked to poorer child development, study shows

By Jack Guy, CNN

(CNN) — There is a link between the amount of time children spend on screens and their development, a new study shows, with poorer outcomes seen in learning, speech and emotional regulation among those who spend longer on them.

Researchers reviewed decades of research on the impact of screen time on child development, which looked at nearly three million children aged 18 and under from 64 countries, senior author Sheri Madigan, a professor of psychology at the University of Calgary, Canada, told CNN on Tuesday.

“We found that overall, greater screen time was associated with poorer outcomes for children across several areas of development, including how they think, learn, speak, behave, and regulate emotions,” she said.

“Most of the associations were relatively small, like most other predictors of child development, but small does not mean meaningless, particularly when we’re talking about an exposure like screen time, which is nearly universal in children’s lives.”

Madigan added that newer studies presented evidence of stronger associations between screen time and child development than older ones.

One possible explanation is that screen time has changed, she said.

“Twenty years ago, a child might have spent an hour watching a television program. Today, devices are everywhere, carried in our hands, and they are also interactive, engaging, and responsive to the individual,” Madigan said.

“We need to better understand not just how children interact with technology, but how technology interacts with children.”

Not all bad

Nonetheless, she said parents shouldn’t conclude that “screens are inherently bad for children” after reading the study but should pay attention to how they are used.

“Technology is a big part of children’s lives and digital technologies can be wonderful tools to support children’s learning, creativity, and connection,” she said.

“However, they can also crowd out what children really need to thrive, such as sleep, physical activity, human connection, learning, and play.”

As a start, rather than getting rid of devices completely, parents could identify an area or time period in which screens get in the way of what children need.

“For many families, a good place to start is having device-free dinners or creating a regular time of day when everyone puts devices aside and connects with one another,” she added.

Governments have role to play

Parents shouldn’t be left to manage screen time alone, and governments also have a role to play, said Madigan.

“Governments should treat children’s screen use the way they treat other factors that we know are associated with children’s well-being, including through screen-use guidance for families, education, research, and ensuring children are safeguarded from online harms,” she said.

“When governments do this, it helps signal to parents, schools, and technology companies that screen use is something worth taking seriously.”

Next, Madigan and her fellow researchers will investigate which children are more affected by different digital experiences and why.

“Because our findings are correlational, they don’t prove that screens cause these developmental outcomes. While it’s possible that screen use may contribute to difficulties, it is also possible that children who are struggling turn to screens more,” she said.

“Disentangling the direction of these associations is therefore an important future direction.”

Tatiana Íñiguez Berrozpe, senior lecturer in sociology at the University of Zaragoza, Spain, who was not involved in the study, said it was “a methodologically very sound article” that draws on an “extremely large” sample.

In a comment released via the Science Media Centre (SMC), she said that “the main findings confirm what research has been showing for years and which puts the current media and social moral panic surrounding the relationship between young people and screens into perspective: there is an association between screen time and poorer indicators of mental health and academic performance, but it is very small.”

Esther van Sluijs, professor of behavioral epidemiology at Loughborough University in the UK, who was also not involved in the study, said that “this is a high-quality study,” with some caveats.

“It cannot draw robust conclusions about specific types of screen use, like social media use or gaming, as there was not enough data to study this,” she said in a statement published by SMC.

“We should therefore be cautious in interpreting these results in the context of young people’s current screen use habits.”

The study was published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics.

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