What We Don't Know Can Hurt Us

On a summer afternoon recently, a friend and I started talking about screen time. Her boys, who ranged in age from ten to fourteen, were decent students. One was on a soccer team, two played musical instruments, and all enjoyed roaming around outdoors. But they really loved their computers. Their dad, a software engineer, had put together an elaborate desktop system for each child, complete with Mine-craft and other games. The day I was visiting her, my friend was in a constant low-level battle to get them away from their screens. It was like watching her swat flies. As soon as she sent one child outside or got one to read a book, another would sneak on to a computer.

There was nothing unusual about the frequency with which her kids were looking at a screen, at least when compared with other American kids. A 2015 survey commissioned by Common Sense Media found that tweens (ages eight to twelve) are spending five hours and twelve minutes per day consuming digital media (not including listening to music and using screens at school or for homework). Teens (ages thirteen to eighteen), meanwhile, are spending about eight hours and twenty minutes on digital media each day. A lot of parents are skeptical of these numbers when I reveal them, but other surveys have found the same thing. In 2010, the Kaiser Family Foundation actually found that kids from eight to eighteen are consuming more than eight-and-a-half hours of media per day — including listening to music on a device.

But when parents stop to add it all up — the texting, the social media, the web surfing, the video games, the Netflix — they find the numbers less shocking. There is quite a bit of variation in these numbers. Teenagers whose parents had a college degree consumed slightly less than seven hours per day. Those from families with a higher income and who were white consumed less digital media than children from lower-income, less-educated minority homes.

But let's assume that teens with all of the advantages in life are still spending upward of five hours on screens each day. What does that mean? Laura Vanderkam, who writes books about the way we manage our time, is fond of saying: "Time is a choice; 'I don't have time' means 'it's not a priority.'"

When we think of all the things our kids don't seem to have a spare minute for — time to play outside, to see their friends, to read a book for pleasure, or to talk to a parent about their day — it is worth remembering that they are spending several hours a day watching videos, browsing websites, texting friends, and checking in on social media.

My friend was unsure about what could be done for her boys and their seemingly magnetic attraction to screens, or whether anything should be done. So she consulted her pediatrician: "How much time should my kids be online?" she asked.

"Well," he began, "there are no longitudinal studies on the effects of screen time so I really can't tell you."

It was an odd response, and not what she was expecting. But he is right. There are no studies of the long-term effects of what we now think of as screen time. It's weird to think that the iPad has only been around since 2010. There are studies of video games and studies of television, subjects to which we will return, but when it comes to social media, touchscreen technology, apps for small children, the effects of mobile devices on kids, or even texting, we don't have a good picture of how these things can alter learning, behavior, personality, or success in adulthood.

For some parents, perhaps that might bring a sense of comfort. Look, there's nothing to prove that technology is harming my child! But for most, it seems, the lack of information is only deepening the profound sense of unease that many parents have. It's the sense that we are all operating in the dark here.

Why did my friend ask her doctor about this subject? There was nothing ailing her children. They were exhibiting no signs of social problems or physical sickness. But parents don't know where to turn anymore for guidance about screen time.

In the fall of 2016, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) came out with new recommendations for kids and screen time. Children under eighteen months should completely avoid digital media, apart from Skype or apps that allow them to see and talk to Grandma in another state. Children from ages two to five should watch screens no more than an hour a day, which includes television programs, games on phones and tablets, and Netflix on the laptop. And even that hour should involve "coviewing," meaning parents should be sitting on the couch watching with their child.

For kids who are older, the AAP said that families had to set their own guidelines, but they made some priorities clear. Before kids look at a screen, they should have gone to school, done their homework, spent an hour doing some kind of physical activity, and socialized with family or friends. For young children, which the AAP recommends need between nine and twelve hours of sleep per day, this does not leave a lot of free time.

After the new recommendations appeared, a number of news outlets suggested that the AAP guidelines were now looser (because babies were allowed to Skype and some of the recommendations for older kids were left more to the discretion of families). "It doesn't make sense to make a blanket statement [for] screen time anymore," Yolanda Reid Chassiakos, a researcher at University of California Los Angeles and author of the new report, told CNN.

But truth be told, if parents actually adhered to these recommendations, kids would be in much better shape. If twelve-year-olds, who got home from school at three or four in the afternoon, were required to play outside for an hour, do homework for another hour or two, and have dinner with their families before they could even pick up a tablet or phone for a few hours at eight in the evening with a firm ten o'clock bedtime, our children's consumption of media would look a lot different than it does now.

Yet very few parents are going to take these recommendations to heart. It's possible that pediatricians telling new mothers that they should not sit their first child in front of a television screen for too long may affect behavior, but if they don't make a real commitment to limit technology, the forces pushing them to hand over the phone are simply going to overwhelm whatever initial advice they received — certainly by the time the next child arrives. If these doctors wanted to have any impact on parent behavior, they should have been a lot more forceful.

Pediatricians could be allies in a war that parents know they're fighting. Instead, these doctors seem to be as weak-willed as the...