Children threatened by too many screens? Science is not so categorical

Children glued to screens, to the point of threatening their development. The idea regularly worries many personalities and politicians 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 might be the evil of the century”, estimated in December a hundred French deputies in a forum in Le Monde.

These elected officials belong to the presidential majority of Emmanuel Macron but their text was also signed by opponents from both right and left, such as the former socialist presidential candidate Benoît Hamon, as well as personalities such as the singer of the group Indochine, Nicola Sirkis.

This vast panel testifies to the wide repercussions of a concern: children spend too much time in front of screens – computers, smartphones, televisions, etc. – and this endangers their good 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 crisis. The closure of schools and confinements have particularly exposed children to screens, whether in a school or recreational setting.

However, 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”, hammered the signatories of the forum, who submitted a bill to the Assembly 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 12, 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 JAMA Psychiatry, the one of the leading psychiatric research journals.

– A symptom rather than a cause –

This study is important because it is not an isolated work among others. This is a “meta-analysis”, which takes up a large number of pre-existing studies and assesses in particular their level of seriousness. 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.

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 too much at screens… 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.

“It is a very complex subject and we cannot conclude that it is the exposure to screens which 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.