KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Health experts are concerned about the long-term effects of excessive screen time for adolescents. According to a recent study published by JAMA Pediatrics, teens spent nearly eight hours a day in front of a screen — double their pre-pandemic estimates of nearly four hours.
Experts say this is partly due to what they call “doomscrolling” — the habit of mindlessly scrolling through negative news. Jacob Marszalek, a psychology professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, says this can be due to boredom or chasing dopamine, but it is rooted in human evolution.
“Our ancestors had to be more attuned to dangers in the environment than to safe things in the environment,” Marszalek said.
This offers some explanation as to why people are drawn to screens. But how does this information overload affect the most vulnerable population in adverse ways?
“They have their view of the world, and the world around them, influenced and altered by what they are seeing on their screens,” Marszalek said.
Marszalek says this is due to three separate phenomenons:
- Recency bias — the tendency to think of most recent memories as being the most significant events in one's life.
- Priming fallacy — the tendency to be influenced by the first thing one sees.
- Anchoring bias — the tendency to put undue weight on initial judgments or decisions on something without adjusting one's thoughts later on.
“If you see a big headline saying something scary about COVID, then you kind of latch onto that, and that's the frame that you evaluate all other judgments about COVID on,” Marszalek said.
Ram Chettiar, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at Children’s Mercy Hospital, says experts are considering how these negative psychological primers are manifesting themselves in children as they grow.
“When we don’t have that social interaction, we’re at higher risk for things such as depression or anxiety," Chettiar said. "Excessive screen time may lead to additional problems with focus and attention. When we’re on screens toward bedtime, that blue light from the screens can suppress our own body’s production of melatonin and lead to sleep issues."
JAMA Pediatrics conducted a 2021 study with over 80,000 children globally. In the first year of the pandemic, one in four children experienced clinically elevated symptoms of depression, and one in five children experienced symptoms of anxiety.
"The scary part is, as some of these restrictions have eased, the screen time has remained high — higher than pre-pandemic rates," Chettiar said. "So we’re seeing that this might be a longer-lasting issue than we were initially anticipating.”
Marszalek says parents should keep a close eye on their children and notice the signs they are spending too much time online. Children will show changes in behavior, mood, grades, desire to engage in activity or even verbally express feelings of anxiety or depression.
He advises parents to set boundaries and rules in a nonarbitrary way.
“Don’t just say, ‘You only get an hour because I said so.’ Instead, construct some natural buffers. For example, get your kids involved in some activities,” Marszalek said.
Then, try having conversations with teens about what they are seeing online, educate them about how to assess the risks.
“If this bad event happens, how big of an impact is it likely to have on you? And then the other is probability of the hazard — how likely is this to happen?” Marszalek said.
