Campus Review Vol. 29 Issue 3 - March 2019 | Seite 20

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SCREENS AND WELLBEING
Screen it out
Studies cast doubt on
screen time rules.
Elizabeth Handsley interviewed
by Loren Smith
W
hen 5pm hits, Jessica flicks
on the TV. She knows Lula,
her two-and-a-half-year-
old, will pass the hour in relative peace
watching ABC Kids. Proponents of screen-
time rules may caution her: no more than
that per day, until Lulu is five.
A recent study seems to lend support
for this position. Researchers at the
University of Calgary, Canada, asked
parents to evaluate their children’s
abilities at ages two and three, and
compare them to when the children
were three and five.
Overall, a “significant association” was
found between higher screen time when
the children were young and poorer
language, communication and motor
skills when they were older.
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But the screen time science is far from
settled. While the Canadian study, which
involved 2400 children, had merely
associational findings, much larger ones
have concluded the opposite. For example,
a 2017 study by the universities of Oxford
and Cardiff involving 19,957 interviews with
parents of two to five-year-olds found that
there was “little or no support for harmful
links between digital screen use and young
people’s psychological wellbeing”.
“Evidence did not support implementing
limits (< 1 or < 2 hr/day) as recommended
by the American Academy of Pediatrics,
once variability in child ethnicity, age,
gender, household income and caregiver
educational attainment were considered,”
the researchers determined.
Another Oxford study, published this year,
analysed three lots of data, totalling 355,358
responses, on wellbeing and adolescent
screen time.
“The association we find between digital
technology use and adolescent wellbeing
is negative but small, explaining at most
0.4 per cent of the variation in wellbeing ...
These effects are too small to warrant
policy change,” the authors, Amy Orben
and Andrew Przybylski, wrote.
A 2017 study, also led by Przybylski, found
“little or no support” for the theory that
digital screen use, on its own, is bad for the
psychological wellbeing of children aged
two to five.
So, should we scrunch up the screen time
rule book?
Not so fast, says Jean Twenge. Replying
to the Canadian study, the American
psychology professor (who once declared
that smartphones have destroyed a
generation) said “this analysis examined
just four items measuring wellbeing: how
often the child was affectionate, smiled
or laughed, showed curiosity and showed
resilience – characteristics that might
describe the vast majority of preschool
children. This study also didn’t include
school-age children or teens.”
In typical researcher fashion, she decided
to conduct her own study, using similar
data that included 19 different measures of
wellbeing for children aged up to 17.
Twenge found an association between
more screen time and less wellbeing for 18
out of the 19 indicators.
“This research is correlational. In other
words, it isn’t clear whether more screen
time leads to depression and anxiety, or that
someone who’s depressed or anxious is
more likely to spend more time in front of
screens,” she admitted.
Despite this, she labelled excessive
screen time a “red flag” for anxiety,
depression and attention issues among
children and teens.
SCREENS GENERALLY
Tony Okely bolsters Twenge’s view.
The senior professor and director of
research at Early Start at the University
of Wollongong told Campus Review
that to determine a correlation between
screen time and child development,
“gold-standard experimental designs
that randomly assign children to receive
or not receive screen time, and then see
how they develop, are needed”.
“Given the ethical challenges of such a
study and the ubiquity of digital technology,
this type of research is nearly impossible.”
Okely is currently working to update
a systematic review on screen time and
cognition in young people aged 5–17. Yet
the latest, 2016 version suggests what
people intuitively know: excessive screen
time is a bad thing.
Although he acknowledges that there is
less evidence regarding the use of newer
technologies like mobile phones and
tablets (as opposed to television, videos
and internet browsing), “the amount of time
a child spends in front of a screen does