Children glued to screens, to the point of threatening their development. The idea regularly worries, especially in France, many personalities and political leaders, who call for it to be a public health issue. However, the scientific data are far from supporting such alarmism.
“The overexposure of children to screens could be the evil of the century”, estimated in December a hundred French deputies of the ruling majority in a daily forum The worldalso signed by right-wing and left-wing opponents and personalities, such as the singer of the Indochine group, Nicola Sirkis.
This vast panel testifies to the repercussions of a concern: children spend too much time in front of screens — computers, cell phones, televisions, etc. — and this endangers their healthy intellectual development. Regularly expressed for years in a context of the rise of new technologies, this fear has found a new echo with the COVID-19 crisis. The closure of schools and confinements have particularly exposed children to screens, whether in a school or recreational setting.
However, 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”, hammered the signatories of the forum, who tabled a bill at the end of February to carry out awareness-raising actions.
However, these concerns are far from unanimous among psychiatrists and child development specialists. Studies on the subject are numerous, but their conclusions vary greatly and their quality is very uneven.
In children under twelve, there is indeed a link between time spent in front of screens and possible behavioral problems, but this is “weak”, shows a study published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Psychiatryone of the leading psychiatric research journals.
Symptom rather than cause
This study is important, because it is not an isolated work among others. This is a “meta-analysis”, which includes a large number of pre-existing studies and assesses in particular their level of rigor. Its conclusions are therefore, a priori, much more solid than these studies taken separately.
However, it is precisely the least serious studies that tend to be the most alarmist. According to the authors, these works frequently tend to “exaggerate the effects (of screens) because of a lack of methodological rigor”.
The authors 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.
It is a very complex subject, and we cannot conclude that it is the exposure to screens that creates 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 did not participate in this work.
Above all, it is very difficult to say in which direction the relationship of cause and effect is going. Are children having problems because they have looked at screens too much…or are they spending too much time in front of them because they already have problems, for example related to difficulties in their home or a lack of social life ? By targeting screens, we risk attacking the symptom rather than the cause.
“This is a very complex subject, and we cannot conclude that it is the exposure to screens that creates problems”, estimated Russell Viner, in a comment addressed to the organization Science Media Center. “For many children, as for us adults, […] screens can be a positive source of education and distraction,” he concluded.