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The idea of children addicted to screens regularly worries many personalities and political leaders, particularly in France, who call for it to be made a public health issue. However, scientists are far from confirming these concerns.
“Children’s overexposure to screens could be the evil of the century”, estimated in December a hundred French deputies of the majority in power in a forum in the daily Le Monde. Children would spend too much time in front of screens – computers, smartphones, televisions, etc. – and this would endanger their good intellectual development.
According to the signatories, the screens have “a harmful influence on sleep, food or even the management of emotions”they also threaten “the acquisition of language (and) the memorization of knowledge”. Regularly expressed for years in a context of the rise of new technologies, this fear has found a new echo with the Covid crisis. The closure of schools and confinements have particularly exposed children to screens, whether in a school or recreational setting.
A “weak” link between screen time and behavioral problems
However, these concerns are far from unanimous among psychiatrists and child development specialists. Studies on the subject are numerous, but their conclusions vary widely and their quality is uneven. In children under the age of twelve, there is indeed a link between time spent in front of screens and possible behavioral problems, but it is “weak”, shows a study published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Psychiatry, one of the leading psychiatric research journals.
According to the authors, the various studies that can be read on this subject frequently tend to “to exaggerate the effects (of screens) because of a lack of methodological rigor” and to be alarmist. They also note that the most recent studies, on the whole, show less and less of a marked link between exposure to screens and behavioral problems.
Certainly, this study admits that there is a relationship between the two phenomena but “the links found are really light, which is reassuring”, commented the British psychiatrist Russell Viner, who was not involved in this work. Above all, it is very difficult to say in which direction the relationship of cause and effect is going.