Can We Stop The Moral Panic Yet? New Study: Children’s Brains Are Not Harmed By Screen Time

Over the last few years, we've highlighted study after study after study showing that, contrary to the public narrative, claims by politicians, the media, and plaintiffs in many, many lawsuits, the actual evidence just does not show at all that social media/internet is doing damage to kids. In a recent post we highlighted just a few of the recent reports on this.

• Last fall, the widely respected Pew Research Center did a massive study on kids and the internet, and found that for a majority of teens, social media was way more helpful than harmful.
• This past May, the American Psychological Association (which has fallen for tech moral panics in the past, such as with video games) released a huge, incredibly detailed, and nuanced report going through all of the evidence, and finding no causal link between social media and harms to teens.
• Soon after that, the US Surgeon General (in the same White House where Wu worked for a while) came out with a report which was misrepresented widely in the press. Yet, the details of that report also showed that no causal link could be found between social media and harms to teens. It did still recommend that we act as if there were a link, which was weird and explains the media coverage, but the actual report highlights no causal link, while also pointing out how much benefit teens receive from social media).
• A few months later, an Oxford University study came out covering nearly a million people across 72 countries, noting that it could find no evidence of social media leading to psychological harm.
• The Journal of Pediatrics just published a new study again noting that after looking through decades of research, the mental health epidemic faced among young people appears largely due to the lack of open spaces where kids can be kids without parents hovering over them. That report notes that they explored the idea that social media was a part of the problem, but could find no data to support that claim.

Now, the folks at Oxford University, who did one of those studies above, have released another study, this time looking at almost 12,000 kids in the US to determine whether screen time" had an impact on their brain function or well-being. This is a pretty massive study, and the results are pretty damn clear:

Screen time activities included traditional' screen pursuits such as watching TV shows or movies and using digital platforms such as YouTube to watch videos, as well as interactive pursuits like playing video games. In addition, they were asked about connecting with others through apps, calls, video calls and social media.

Even with participants who had high rates of digital engagement, there was no evidence of impaired functioning in the brain development of the children.

The study appears pretty thorough:

Using data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, the largest long-term study of brain development and child health in the United States, researchers from Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, University of Oregon, Tilburg University, and University of Cambridge analysed the cognitive function of 9-12 year old children alongside their self-reported screen time use.

[....]

In the ABCD study, the participants' neurodevelopment was assessed through monitoring functional brain connectivity, which refers to how regions of the brain work together and includes emotional and physiological activities. This was done through MRI scans. Further to this, physical and mental health assessments and information from the child's caregiver was provided.

When analysing the screen time use alongside the ABCD data, patterns of functional brain connectivity were related to patterns of screen engagement, but there was no meaningful association between screen time use and measures of cognitive and mental well-being, even when the evidential threshold was set very low.

The researchers behind this study were pretty clear on what they feel has been learned (and I'll note that Andrew, in particular, is always extremely careful not to overclaim what his studies say, as you can hear when we had him on the podcast recently):

Jack Miller, the first author who analysed the data as part of his thesis at the Oxford Internet Institute said: If screen time had an impact on brain development and well-being, we expected to see a variety of cognitive and well-being outcomes that this comprehensive, representative, research did not show."

Professor Andrew Przybylski who supervised the work added: We know that children's brains are more susceptible to environmental influence than adults, as digital screen time is a relatively new phenomenon, it's important to question its impact."

Professor Matti Vuorre from Tilburg University, a co-author observed: One thing that makes this work stand out is our analysis plan was reviewed by experts before we saw the data; this adds rigour to our approach." He added, One also suggested we take a look at social media on its own because it's a source of worry for many and we did not find anything special about this form of online engagement."

Professor Przybylski concludes: Our findings should help guide the heated debates about technology away from hyperbole and towards high-quality science. If researchers don't improve their approach to studying tech, we'll never learn what leads some young people to flounder and others to flourish in the digital age."

All of this research is important, because clearly there does remain a mental health crisis going on, including among children. But we risk making things worse, not better when we immediately insist that it must be because of the internet, or video games, or screen time or whatever.

You can also read the full study yourself if you'd like to get at the details, since they published it as open access. And, because they put it under a creative commons attributions license, we can also post a copy here.