Suspicious New Research Exaggerates Positive Side of Teen Screen Time

Suspicious New Research Exaggerates Positive Side of Teen Screen Time

Yesterday as I was listening to my daily rundown of podcast during my commute, the latest episode of Marketplace Tech caught my ear. The episode title is Teens on screens might be a good thing.

To sum it up, there is new research on the impact of screen time on the mental health of teens. During the podcast, the host interviews one of the authors of this research, Michaeline Jensen. She is an assistant professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Jensen states:

But our findings are quite consistent with an emerging body of literature, which suggests that these correlations that have been observed between technology and mental health are quite small. Those small effect sizes perhaps were gleaned from the earlier studies, when not all teens were using technology to the same degree. In today’s day and age, where most teens are digitally connected, it looks like it’s more normal for teens to have a lot of engagement online, and that perhaps it’s not linked with negative mental health outcomes.

The broader literature has recently suggested that teens who are most needing support go online to get it in the form of social support or maybe searching for information about their mental health difficulties. And, in our study, one of the few significant findings that did emerge was that those teenagers who were the heaviest text messengers, who spent the most time messaging, reported less depression than those teens who were less frequent text messengers. So that might mean that perhaps teens are using these online tools, like text messaging, and that it’s serving as a strength, a source of social support, for instance.

Screen Time Good? Hold Please…

This is the first time I’ve seen researchers attempting to present evidence showing screen time as a good thing. However, this evidence is superficial at best. From what I can gather, the news sources covering this research are deeply exaggerating the findings.

The vast majority of headlines are making huge assertions about screen time and mental health. Then once you click through, the articles only highlight the fact that text messaging helps teens get social support. This is not only a let down, but also suspicious. When you search for articles covering this research, dozens of sources come up. I can’t help to think who is funding this research when I see this type of vast media coverage. Are big tech and telecom companies paying for this research? So far, I can’t confirm this. But this is my suspicion.

So at this point I’m taking this research with a grain of salt. However, I did find one nugget of advice as a useful takeaway. Jensen suggest instead of letting your kids use technology alone, use it with them. This means watching Youtube and playing video games with them in the living room. Jensen believes that this is the best way to make sure teens are not using technology in a harmful way. In my opinion, this is solid advice. Spending more quality time with your children on their terms is sure to help more than the technology hurts.

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