Screen time's effect on adolescent sadness
In recent months, Silicon Valley executives have been speaking out about the purposely addictive designs of smartphones and social media, which make them hard to put down for anyone, but particularly teenagers. Now, a new report puts numbers to the warnings, tying a sudden and large drop in adolescents' happiness with the proliferation of smartphones.
The report, "Decreases in Psychological Well-Being Among American Adolescents After 2012 and Links to Screen Time During the Rise of Smartphone Technology, "was published in the journal Emotion using a large national survey of 8th, 10th, and 12th graders conducted annually by The University of Michigan. After rising since the early 1990s, adolescent self-esteem, life satisfaction, and happiness plunged after 2012, the year smartphone ownership reached the 50 percent mark in the U.S., the report said. It also found that adolescents' psychological well-being decreased the more hours a week they spent on screens, including the Internet, social media, texting, gaming, and video chats. The findings jibe with earlier studies linking frequent screen use and teenage depression and anxiety.
The study graphed correlations between happiness and screen activities and non-screen activities such as sports, in-person interaction, religious services, print media and homework. For all the non-screen activities, the correlation was positive; for the screen activities it was uniformly negative.
"When I made that graph I got up and took my kids' Kindle Fires and shoved them in the back of a drawer," said Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University and the study's lead author.
Twenge, the author of "iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy — and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood," called the relationship of screen and non-screen activities "zero sum." If you are doing one, it takes time away from the others.
The report's findings were not all dire: Teenagers who get a small amount of exposure to screen time, between one and 5 hours a week, are happier than those who get none at all. The least happy ones were those who used screens for 20 or more hours a week. The happiest teens, according to the study, are those who are above average in face-to-face social interaction time and below average in social media use.
Amanda Lenhart, deputy director of the Better Life Lab at New America, called the study interesting but said that it is hard to separate screen time from other stressors that may be affecting teenagers' happiness, such as the political or economic landscape.
"The culturally easy scapegoat right now is the technology — it's new, it's scary, it's changed our lives, it's changed our kids' lives," she said.
While she generally advises moderation, Lenhart said rather than making one set of rules about screen time, she prefers a case-by-case approach.
"Some of it is about your particular kid, and your particular life, and you as a parent," she said. "Some of it is you looking at your child and saying 'Something is not right here.'"