Teens who spend less time with screens are happier, study finds
WASHINGTON— In recent months, Silicon Valley executives have been speaking out about the purposely addictive designs of smartphones and social media, which make them hard to put down for anyone, but particularly teenagers. Now, a new report puts numbers to the warnings, tying a sudden and large drop in adolescents’ happiness with the proliferation of smartphones, and finding that the more hours a day teens spend in front of screens, the less satisfied they are.
The report, “Decreases in Psychological Well-Being Among American Adolescents After 2012 and Links to Screen Time During the Rise of Smartphone Technology,” was published Monday in the journal Emotion using a large U.S. survey of 8th, 10th and 12th graders conducted annually by the University of Michigan. After rising since the early 1990s, adolescent self-esteem, life satisfaction and happiness plunged after 2012, the year smartphone ownership reached the 50-per-cent mark in the U.S., the report said. It also found that adolescents’ psychological well-being decreased the more hours a week they spent on screens, including the internet, social media, texting, gaming and video chats. The findings jibe with earlier studies linking frequent screen use to teenage depression and anxiety.
The ubiquity of the devices has mushroomed in the past six years: the percentage of teens who had smartphones jumped from 37 per cent in 2012 to 73 per cent in 2015 to 89 per cent at the end of 2016, according to data from the Pew Research Center and The Associated PressNORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
The study graphed correlations between happiness and screen activities and non-screen activities such as sports, in-person interaction, religious services, print media and homework. For all the non-screen activities, the correlation was positive; for the screen activities it was uniformly negative.
“When I made that graph I got up and took my kids’ Kindle Fires and shoved them in the back of a drawer,” said Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University and the study’s lead author.
Twenge, the author of iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy — and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood, called the relationship of screen and non-screen activities “zero sum” — if you are doing one, it takes time away from the others.
As with any addiction, breaking away can be unpleasant. Ed Lazzara of Salem, Ore., says his 12-year-old son Leo, a fan of the game Minecraft, is more irritable after he has been playing a lot. “It’s like interacting in the real world doesn’t have that zing, you know?” Lazzara said.
The report’s findings were not all dire: teenagers who get a small amount of exposure to screen time, between one and five hours a week, are happier than those who get none at all. The least happy ones were those who used screens for 20 or more hours a week.
The greater unhappiness among those with no screen exposure could be due to several factors, Twenge said. “It could be that they are left out of the social scene of high school, that it’s very difficult to carry on friendships in high school these days without texting at all or being on social media.” It is also possible that those kids are outliers, she said — teens with special needs or in special education, or those whose screens were confiscated.
The happiest teens, according to the study, are those who are above average in face-to-face social interaction time and below average in social-media use.