Teens And Screens: How Do TVs, Computers, And Smartphones Impact Your Teenager's Wellbeing?

Parents are bombarded with warnings that "screen time" — time spent looking at a TV, computer, tablet, or smartphone — can have a negative impact on child development from the very moment they welcome their new baby. Screens, we're all told, increase the risk of childhood obesity, cause dysfunctional sleep, delay speech development, and mess with kids' emerging executive functioning skills. 

Some anti-screen advocates will advise parents of young kids to banish screens from the home altogether, while other organizations warn moms and dads to keep screen time to no more than one or two hours a day or to offer strictly educational content. 

Two-thirds of parents of teens are, the Pew Research Center found, concerned about the amount of time their adolescent sons and daughters spend looking at electronic devices. Fifty-seven percent impose limits. Parents aren't alone in their worries, either, as just over half of all US teens believe they spend too much time on their phones — now a prime way to access the internet — as well. 

How does screen time affect teens' wellbeing?

A large study that incorporated 17,000 teenagers from the United Kingdom, Ireland, and the United States set out to establish exactly how screen time affects teens' psychological health. To get the answers they were after, the authors of the study did a few different things.

They gave questionnaires to the teens' parents or guardians to get answers to questions about the teens social attitudes, peer relationships, and behavior and behavioral problems. They tested how much self-esteem the teenagers had, and gave the teens questions that were meant to assess their moods, including to look at potential depression. Then, the study looked at how much time the teens spent using "screens", during school days as well as weekends. 

There are other dimensions, too, of course. Screens themselves may not make your teenager unhappy, violent, depressed, or lonely, but the content they interact with can have a profound impact on their quality of life. 

Screen time can also, other research found, lead to poorer academic performance. This makes sense, if you consider that a teen who's messaging their friends all afternoon or playing online games clearly isn't studying — but not so much if the teen is doing their homework with the help of a computer, which also happens. 

Excessive screen time may also lead to decreased sleep, if your teen is spending time on devices instead of sleeping. It may contribute to troubled and distant family relationships, if you're all hanging around a screen constantly rather than having actual meaningful conversations. Screens may be distressing, if distressing content is accessed through them.

Electronic devices are tools, in other words, and the impact using that tool has will depend on what a teenager does with it.

How can you limit your teen's screen time in a positive way?

How can you restrict the amount of time your teenager spends in cyberspace without making it a big argument? If you belong to the 54 percent of parents of teenagers who believes it's important to set limits on screen time but you want to do so in a positive manner, here are some tips.

• Make very sure to carve out family time to engage in non-screen activities with your teens. Rather than resenting you for telling them to put their phones and computers away, they'll be pumped that you are putting your own devices away to spend time with them. Board games, family dinners, hiking, or visiting museums are all options. 
• When you make your teen "switch off", do it yourself, too. Nobody likes a hypocrite, least of all teenagers.
• Make sure your teen gets enough physical activity. Yup, they may be Instagramming as they do it, but at least it means they're not sedentary, which is a health risk.
• Talk about the things your teen is doing online, and join in if you can. Watch shows together, learn a new language together, follow current affairs, or play video games. When you're engaged in screen time together in a social way, it goes from a solitary activity to a prosocial behavior that doesn't just include screen time, but also fascinating conversations.
• Encourage your teen to make mindful decisions about how they spend their time with screens. Reading a book on Kindle or doing research for an essay — or watching science documentaries and analyzing movies, for that matter — is a whole lot different than watching cute cat videos or gossiping about classmates for hours on end. 
• Have discussions about teenage drama and how it can unfold online. Let your teen know they can come to you if they need to. Discuss online safety. 

A final word

The online technologies that have reeled us all in are here to stay — but they are, in themselves, neutral tools that can be used in creative and prosocial ways or in destructive, harmful ways. 

The large study we looked at demonstrates that screens don't generally have a negative impact on teens' emotional and social health by themselves, but that doesn't mean the things they see on those screens cannot. Nor does it mean that abandoning everything else life has to offer to become a semi-permanent netizen is a healthy choice; life beyond screens matters. 

An open and positive relationship with your teen will allow you, at least to some extent, to discuss everything that's important to your teen, including the things they do online, in your home. As you do so, you don't have to worry that the physical act of looking at screens will permanently damage their physical or psychological health.