There May Be A Sweet Spot For Screen Time For Teens, Study Suggests

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BOSTON, MA – MAY 30: Jordan Herzog, 16, aka Crimz, plays Fortnite at his home in Sudbury, MA on May … [+] 30, 2019. Jordan is one of the world’s top Fortnite players and recently qualified for the Fortnite World Cup, a huge gaming competition in New York City held in July. For much of the past few months, his life has been contained in this extra bedroom. Its where he eats all of his meals, where he works through the few hours of daily online lessons that serve as his schooling. And where he spends eight to 10 hours a day – though sometimes as many as 14 – training to become one of the best competitive video game players in the world. All of it under the watchful eye of his father. As parents across the country worry over the amount of time their kids spend playing video games – limiting screen-time and sometimes banning gaming altogether – Jordans father, Dave Herzog, has gone the other way. The 49-year-old has spent more than $30,000 on state-of-the-art gaming equipment – the best computers, monitors, and keyboards money can buy. He has suspended family vacations for the foreseeable future, so as not to interfere with his sons training. Last year, he took the extraordinary step of withdrawing his son from Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School – over the initial protests of Jordans mother – so that his son would have more time to devote to video games. (Photo by Craig F. Walker/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

Boston Globe via Getty Images

We’ve all heard the notion that kids spend entirely too much time in front of screens and that it’s detrimental to the mental health of teens.

But there’s also increasing evidence that as our lives become ever more online and dependent on myriad forms of digital communication, teens that spend a low amount of time connected also suffer.

A new study out of Trinity College in Dublin suggests it is possible to strike a balance and find the “Goldilocks zone” for young people and digital media.

“There is a simple narrative out there that more is worse. It is important to emphasize that online engagement is now a normal channel of social participation and non-use has consequences,” explains study co-author and sociology professor Richard Layte in a statement. “Our findings also raise the possibility that moderate use is important in today’s digital world and that low levels of online engagement carries its own risks. Now the questions for researchers are how much is too much and how little is too little?”

The study does not specifically offer an ideal amount of screen time for children and teens, but it does break down the more than 6,000 young Irish people researchers included in the longitudinal study into low, moderate and high use groups.

High use is typically characterized as more than four hours a day of digital media use, but the study also went deeper to consider the kinds of digital media engagement, using behavior categories like social, educational or entertainment.

Unsurprisingly, the data showed that high engagement with digital media was correlated with worse mental health outcomes. But low use was also associated with worse mental health.

The study is published in the most recent issue of the journal Computers in Human Behavior.

“Digital media and online usage is a controversial topic when it comes to its effect on mental health, with no real consistency of results overall,” said lead author Dr. Ross Brannigan. “While these results are not causal or deterministic, our findings are an important first step on the path to revealing why these relationships exist.”

Given the results, it’s tempting to say that the Goldilocks zone for digital media for teens is somewhere between one and four hours per day. But the results are a bit more nuanced than that.

“Our study highlights possible potential positive effects of moderate, non-passive usage,” the paper reads, highlighting that students who were online for a moderate amount of time with some of that time including school work seemed to have better outcomes.

All in all, the new research appears to back up the common belief that too much screen time can be a problem, while also suggesting that abstaining completely can also be a negative approach in terms of mental health.

But the researchers caution that more work needs to be done.

“It will now be important to build on these findings and further investigate WHY digital media engagement may be related to mental well-being,” Brannigan says.

Meanwhile, it seems safe to say that non-stop screen time is not a great policy for parents, but neither is forcing your child to play solely with sticks and dusty old books all day.

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