From Education Week
By Sarah D. Sparks
April 12, 2022
Without even counting digital instruction, the amount of time teenagers and tweens spend staring at computer screens rivals how much time they would spend working at a full- or a part-time job. Educators and children’s health experts alike argue students need more support to prevent the overuse of technology from leading to unhealthy behaviors in the classroom.
According to an annual report from the nonprofit Common Sense Media, screen use for children and adolescents ages 8 to 18 jumped 17 percent between 2019 and 2021—a steeper increase than in the four years prior to the pandemic. Screen use rose by nearly 50 minutes per day for those ages 8 to 12 (tweens) to five hours and 33 minutes per day, and by more than an hour and 15 minutes for teenagers, to eight hours and 39 minutes per day. And those increases do not include students’ screen time in class or for schoolwork.
Teachers say they see the effects of heightened digital exposure in the classroom. In a nationally representative survey by the EdWeek Research Center in February, 88 percent of educators reported that in their experience, students’ learning challenges rose along with their increased screen time. Moreover, 80 percent of educators said student behavior worsened with more screen time. Over a third said student behavior has gotten “much worse” due to rising screen time.
In my opinion/experience, when the amount of screen time increases, student behavior typically:
In my opinion/experience, when the amount of screen time increases, student learning challenges typically:
Behavior problems associated with excessive screen time were relatively well-known even before the pandemic, including: ramped-up reactions to stress, poorer focus and executive skills, and higher risk of both acting out and internalized depression or anxiety. In some cases, studies have even found students’ technology-related focus problems can be severe enough to be misdiagnosed as attention deficit disorders.
What counts as too much screen time?
But it’s less clear just what kind and how much digital activity qualifies as “excessive.” The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends children ages 2 to 5 get no more than an hour of any sort of screen time a day, but it sets no time limits for school or recreational digital use for school-age children.
One massive research analysis released at the start of the pandemic found that the amount of daily screen time builds across devices; an hour of playing on a tablet or phone apps followed by a couple of television shows and another hour of internet browsing, quickly adds up to four hours of screen time.
The timing of digital use matters too. Minimal screen time after dark on top of excessive screen time during the day can significantly damage sleep for children and adolescents, according to Michelle Garrison, a sleep specialist and research associate professor in child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Washington in Seattle.
In part, that’s because the blue light exuded by many digital devices mimics bright sunlight and delays the release of melatonin, the chemical that regulates natural sleep cycles. Garrison said video games and social media that trigger reward mechanisms in the brain also make it more difficult for children to quiet their brain activity, reducing both the quality and quantity of the sleep they get. This, in turn, can make students more tired and irritable and less focused on learning the following day.
“Sleep isn’t actually always a valued goal for tweens and teens,” Garrison said in a briefing for the Children and Screens Institute of Digital Media and Child Development.
It’s important for educators to help students connect their sleep habits to other goals they do care about, she said: “Whether that’s getting into less fights with their parents or siblings or their girlfriends or boyfriends, or doing better at school, or even being faster at soccer practice, there’s lots of different things that are downstream effects of getting more sleep. Often those are things that we can really leverage to get tweens and teens more motivated to work with us around media use.”
Photo: iStock/Getty Images Plus
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