How a Facebook Whistle-Blower Is Stoking the Kids’ Screen Time Debate
How Kids and Screen Time Debate Morphed in Pandemic
(Bloomberg) -- The latest burst of recriminations directed at social media emphasizes the harm that can be done to teenagers. Frances Haugen, a former Facebook Inc. product manager turned whistle-blower, says executives at Facebook are aware of research showing the company’s Instagram photo-sharing platform in particular can be detrimental to teenage girls with body-image issues. Even before the pandemic increased the time most people spend online, many parents worried about attention-sapping “screen time” warping child development.
1. What’s the debate about screen time?
Even now that most kids are back at school, texting, social media and online video consumption is the way kids stay connected and socialize, at least in wealthy countries. How that might be a bad thing (and a good thing) is fertile ground for researchers trying to catch up with the rapid adoption of new devices and platforms by younger and younger kids. On phones, tablets, consoles and laptops, kids are gaming, chatting on Discord, commenting on live streams on Twitch -- even as they deal with the traditional adolescent stew of school, peer pressure and hormones. They’re figuring it out in front of an audience of hundreds if not thousands of “friends” commenting in real time on what they do, and -- via Snapchat and Instagram -- how they look.
2. What does the research show?
Shunning television, kids have flocked to YouTube for online videos, potentially increasing their exposure to disinformation. Bullying is a problem. A 2018 study led by Jean Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State University, found that U.S. teens who spend more time online are less happy than those who pursue other activities. In other research, Twenge posited that social media is contributing to a rise in teen depression. At the same time, in 2020 she published research showing that not all screen time is created equal -- “hours spent on social media and Internet use were more strongly associated with self-harm behaviors, depressive symptoms, low life satisfaction, and low self-esteem than hours spent on electronic gaming and TV watching.” While parents are supposed to be able to regulate what their kids can see, age requirements are rather easy to circumvent.
3. What is Instagram doing?
Instagram said it’s introducing measures to nudge teens away from harmful content and building new parental control tools for tweens, while pausing work on a version of the service designed specifically for kids “to work with parents, experts, policy makers and regulators, to listen to their concerns.”
4. How much screen time is too much?
Health officials are stressing that non-stop technology use shouldn’t be displacing physical activity, face-to-face interaction and sleep. A paper published in 2019 in the journal Pediatrics suggests kids ages 8-11 who fail to meet Canadian government guidelines for exercise, sleep and a two-hour limit on recreational screen time are more likely to act impulsively and make poorer decisions. Some researchers are searching for the right balance -- what’s sometimes called the “Goldilocks” level of not too little, not too much screen time. A 2017 study published in Psychological Science concluded that the tipping point for computer use was 4 hours and 17 minutes -- even longer on weekends.
5. What happened during the pandemic?
In quarantine, screens became a lifeline to teachers, friends and isolated family members. TikTok, the video app that had become part of daily life for tweens even before the pandemic, set a new quarterly record for app downloads in the first three months of 2020 as kids turned their parents on to its charms. Many parents simply threw in the towel, conceding that efforts to limit screen time were a thing of the past. Even before stay-at-home orders, 8- to 12-year-olds in the U.S. were spending an average of about five hours a day online, with teens clocking about seven and a half hours (excluding for school or homework), according to nonprofit Common Sense Media. Stuck at home, those figures exploded.
6. So where is this headed?
China this year dramatically curbed kids’ video-game playing, saying that people under 18 can only play for three hours a week, down from a 10-hour limit previously. Such a move would be unthinkable in many other places, of course, leaving it to parents and educators to raise a generation of smarter consumers and creators of online content.
The Reference Shelf
- A Bloomberg Opinion column on why school may never be the same again.
- Related QuickTakes on disinformation and cyberbullying.
- Time magazine looked at teen anxiety and depression in 2016.
- Two of Apple’s large shareholders wrote to the board in 2018 urging the company to study the iPhone and child development.
- Psychologist Jean Twenge explored the question: “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?”
- The American Academy of Pediatrics collected recommendations on screen time.
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