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Damage to teenagers from screen time is 'tiny', major study suggests

Technology is not as damaging as people think, say researchers  - PA
Technology is not as damaging as people think, say researchers - PA

The impact of screen time on teenagers' mental health is so tiny that even wearing glasses has a bigger effect, researchers have concluded.

In recent years concerns have been raised that too much technology is damaging youngsters both physically and mentally.

But a study of 300,000 adolescents from Britain and the US found that, at most, only 0.4 per cent of the difference in well-being between youngsters was due to screen time, meaning 99 per cent was because of other factors.

In fact, technology only slightly surpasses the negative effect of regularly eating potatoes and is less impactful on welfare than wearing glasses or being left-handed, the research shows.

“Our findings demonstrate that screen use itself has at most a tiny association with youth mental health,” says lead researcher Professor Andrew Przybylski, Director of Research at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford.

“The 0.4 per cent contribution of screen use on young people’s mental health needs to be put in context for parents and policymakers.

“We were able to demonstrate that including potatoes in your diet showed a similar association with adolescent wellbeing. Wearing corrective lenses had an even worse association.”

In comparison to using technology, smoking marijuana and being bullied was found, on average, to have a 2.7 times and 4.3 times more negative association with adolescent mental health than screen use.

Other activities were found to have a far greater impact on the wellbeing of teenagers, such as eating plenty of fruit and vegetables, which had a positive effect twenty times greater than the negative consequences of technology.

Missing breakfast also had three times had greater effect that technology use, and not getting enough sleep was 44 times as harmful.

However experts pointed out that technology may be driving other effects, such as lack of sleep.

A systematic review published by the BMJ Open last week found a link between screen time and depressive symptoms, and concluded that lost sleep caused by blue light and late night scrolling was probably to blame.

Dr Ben Carter, of the Institute of Psychiatry Psychology & Neuroscience, King's College London (IoPPN), said: “The way in which technology is used by young people and the impact of social media specifically is something we need to look at in future studies.

“Is the technology use of a twelve-year-old spending a few hours on a computer doing school work during the day the same as if it was say, 10pm at night and scrolling through social media posts for the same length of time?”

Last week new guidance from the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) urged parents to stop children using screens for an hour before bedtime, but stopped short of placing daily time limits on technology.

The advice said parents should take firm action if time on smartphones and videogames was displacing other activities - such as sleep, exercise and face-to-face socialising.

Dr Max Davie, the RCPCH officer for health promotion said: “Despite the fact that technology is an increasingly essential part of daily life, the current evidence base for its health impacts is limited.

“It is therefore encouraging to see much-needed new research in this area, as we know that technology use is an issue that causes anxiety for parents.

“Parents should feel empowered to adjust the amount of time spent on screens by them and their children, depending on what’s important to their family life”.

The research was published in Nature Human Behaviour.