In any walk down a city street or stroll through a high school or college campus, you’ll see them: young people with their heads buried in their phones.
In research for my recent book, “iGen,” I found that the average 12th grader spends six hours a day just on texting, the Internet and social media. The Nielsen Company reports that adults spend more than 10 hours a day on screens of all kinds.
There is a growing consensus among psychologists that spending this much time on screens is not healthy. Spending too much time on social media has repeatedly been linked to depression and loneliness.
In a recent study, my colleagues and I found that teens who spent five or more hours a day (compared to an hour) on electronic devices were 66% more likely to have at least one risk factor for suicide such as depression, thinking about suicide or having attempted suicide in the past.
Several studies rule out the idea that unhappiness leads to screen time, instead finding that screen time leads to unhappiness. After smartphones started to become common among young people in 2012, rates of teen depression and suicide increased. That time also saw a spike in teens not sleeping enough, likely because so many teens use their phones right before bedtime, which is both mentally stressful and — due to phones’ daylight-resembling light — physiologically stimulating.
When the link between smoking and lung cancer was first identified in the 1940s, tobacco companies denied the research and continued to do so for decades, claiming that it couldn’t be proven that smoking caused lung cancer.
In contrast, Silicon Valley executives have already begun to own up to the effects of the overuse of technology. Just last week, Apple CEO Tim Cook said he tries to limit his nephew’s screen time and use of social media.
After Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s second child was born last summer, he posed an open letter to her, urging her to find the time to go outside and play. Facebook co-founder Sean Parker said that Facebook “exploits a vulnerability in human psychology … God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”
When a reporter asked Steve Jobs what his kids thought of the iPad in 2010, he said, “They haven’t used it. We limit how much technology our kids use at home.”
With even the tech executives on board, it’s time to move on to the next important question: If spending too much time on screens is bad for our kids, what can we do about it as individuals and as a nation?
Just as we don’t allow minors (or even, in some states, those under 21) to smoke, we should think carefully about giving youth unlimited access to smartphones. Here, then, are a few not-so-modest proposals.
No more phones during the school day, period.
Unlike with tobacco, completely eliminating the source of the addiction here isn’t possible. We can’t go cold turkey off technology, nor should we. But there are ways we can blunt its impact on children and teens.
First, the use of smartphones should be banned outright or severely limited in K-12 schools, staying in backpacks or lockers during the school day.
Teachers say it is difficult to hold the attention of students who are constantly distracted by their phones. One study found that just having your phone nearby reduces your thinking power. Of course general technological literacy is valuable, as is learning to code, but in an increasingly competitive global economy, we want students to focus on learning, not on their phones.
That might be why France decided to ban mobile phone use for younger students beginning this fall. New York schools banned phones starting in 2006, but Mayor de Blasio eliminated the policy in 2015, allowing schools to set their own policies on smartphone use in classrooms and at lunch.
The flexibility during lunch period is especially unfortunate, as many students are buried in their phones during lunch period, a time that could otherwise be used for social interaction. Instead, teens increasingly feel rejected and left out.
As more of his friends got smartphones, 15-year-old Omar (a pseudonym) told me, “I found myself finishing my lunch and sitting there in utter silence wondering what to do … I had started to think that there was something wrong with me that would cause people to not want to talk to me anymore and I started to have serious self-esteem issues.”
Eighteen-year-old Olivia had a similar story. “At school, people are quieter. They all are on their technology ignoring each other. I am dissatisfied with my life because a lot of my friends are addicted to their phones — they seem like they do not want to talk to me.”
A no-phones-at-school rule would also help teens develop invaluable social skills. More and more managers tell me that young job applicants don’t look them in the eye and seem to be uncomfortable talking to people face-to-face. If our students are going to succeed in the workplace, they need more practice interacting with people in person.
They can get that right there at school — if they aren’t constantly on their phones.
Limit school tablets and laptops, too.
Ironically, some of our challenges with technology may be rooted not just in the “junk food” of smartphones, but in the “nutrition” of the supposedly educational devices we are more and more frequently giving kids to enable them to learn.
More and more schools are providing laptops and tablets for their students to use in the classroom and at home. They take notes on them, do their homework, communicate with their teachers and more.
The impulse is a good one, as research has established that one-to-one laptop programs in schools have measurable (though not spectacular) benefits for learning, especially in writing and science. (The benefits for tablets without separate keyboards are not as clear.)
The problems appear when technology is a distraction — and it often is. Kids who are supposed to be working on a school lesson are often playing a game or surfing the web instead.
Three out of four college students admitted that bringing their laptops to class increased the amount of time they spent checking e-mail and going on social media sites during class. Nearly half said they were distracted by the laptop screens of those sitting near them. An experiment with college students showed that those who took notes on paper did better on exams than those who took notes on a laptop.
School-owned laptops and tablets are also a significant distraction for younger students when they bring them home, ostensibly for doing homework. One middle-school teacher told me she got a call from a parent complaining that she was assigning too much homework on the iPad. The teacher told the parent she hadn’t assigned any homework on the iPad yet.
“But I’m doing homework” is now the go-to white lie for kids who want more screen time. In my experience as a parent of three elementary school children, the school iPad is yet another device to keep track of in the constant battle of trying to limit my children’s screen time.
In many ways, the school tablet or laptop seems like a gateway drug — but more difficult to regulate than a drug, because it’s not all bad.
At low doses and used for the right things, it benefits learning. But there is too much of a temptation for kids to watch videos, get sucked into web surfing for hours, or play games that might be educational but can also be addictive.
Even adults have a difficult time staying on task with the temptations of the Internet so close at hand. Children and teens have not yet developed adult levels of self-control. In my view, there’s really no need for tablets or laptops in elementary school, and in middle and high schools they should be used for what they are good for — and then put away.
And when these devices come home, they need stricter controls on what kids can do on them. It’s great that kids can read books or write using a word-processing program, but not as good that they can play games or fall into Internet wormholes.
Restricting adult content is not enough. School devices should also include parental controls with a separate passcode, so parents can make sure they are not used after bedtime. They should also include features such as Guided Access, which allows the parent to lock an iPad on one activity. Thus, if my 11-year-old daughter is reading a book in the online school library, I could lock the device on that book so she can’t start playing a game instead.
Develop better parental controls and time-limiters.
Parents worried about their kids’ screen time have a variety of options for limiting use, but none are ideal.
You can decide to not get your kid a smartphone at all, but especially by high school, that will likely mean they are left out of the social scene (and, sure enough, teens who don’t use social media at all are less happy than those who use it a little).
You can give them a smartphone and use a third-party app or built-in controls to limit use, but these vary widely from one manufacturer to another, can be overwhelming in the choices they offer, and often incur extra fees.
iPhones in particular could use better controls: The built-in settings only allow apps to be turned on and off, without the ability to limit time on them (say, 30 minutes a day maximum on Instagram) or shut them the phone at bedtime so kids go to sleep so they’re not on their phones when their parents think they are sleeping (an activity known as “vamping”).
Facebook has recently taken steps toward improving users’ experiences by prioritizing friends and family updates over news, but the company has yet to acknowledge that spending more time on the site overall is linked to mental health issues. Their business model, built around advertising dollars, means that the more time people spend on the site, the more money they make.
Without formally acknowledging the negative impact of social media overuse, Facebook risks looking like the tobacco executives at the Congressional hearing in 1994, still denying that smoking was addictive. At the very least, Facebook should find a way to enforce its minimum age limit of 13, which is routinely skirted, and limit the number of hours a day that minors can spend on the site. Time limits for adults are a harder sell, but might be something to explore in the future.
We are only at the beginning of this moment of reckoning over phones and the new world that they’ve ushered in, especially for our kids’ developing brains. The next few years may bring more possible solutions, through research, technology or both. For now, we should do all we can to help children and teens use technology for what it’s good for – and then put it down and engage with the people around them.
Twenge is the author of “iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy — and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood” and a professor of psychology at San Diego State University.
