Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Americans have relied on technology to continue working, attending school, contacting healthcare providers, and contacting family and friends.  

But a recent study found that the entertainment screen time of teenagers has also skyrocketed.

According to research published in JAMA Pediatrics on Monday, teenagers’ screen time outside of virtual schools has doubled from an estimated 3.8 hours a day before the pandemic to 7.7 hours.

Dr. Michael Ritchie, director of the Digital Health Laboratory at Boston Children’s Hospital and associate professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, said: “Kids are basically playing screen time for a whole workday.” “When you consider what they do on the screen every day. When the time is 5 to 7 hours, this is a very crazy phenomenon."

Researchers used data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study (a large long-term brain development study funded by the National Institutes of Health) to compare the screen time of 5,412 participants in 2016 with the screen time in May 2020 .

The lead study author, Dr. Jason Nagata, a pediatrician at the University of California, San Francisco, said that in 2016, participants were between 9 and 10 years old. During the pandemic, most are 12 and 13 years old.

Researchers led by the University of California, San Francisco have found that the most common entertainment activities include watching or streaming videos, movies or TV shows, multiplayer games or single-player games.

"The estimate of social media is lower than watching TV and movies, which may reflect this age group," Nagata said. "As adolescents get older, the use of social media (probably) will increase."

Health experts said that the actual screen time may be longer than estimated by the study results because participants were asked to self-report and may underestimate their media usage.

"If anything, it underestimates the time they spend'actively using' the screen," Rich said. "When you add multitasking and environmental exposure... these numbers are low."

The study also found that children from people of color and low-income families spend more time on screens than their white, wealthy peers.

Nagata said: "This may be due to lack of financial resources to do other activities or unable to enter a safe outdoor space."

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The researchers also looked at screen time and the mental health of participants. They found that longer screen time was associated with poorer mental health and greater stress perception, while more social support and better coping behaviors were associated with lower total screen usage.

"As screen time increases, teenagers' worries and stress are increasing, while their ability to cope is declining," he said. "Although social media and video chat can promote social connections and support, we have found that most teenagers use screens during the pandemic did not achieve this goal."

Rich said that previous research has linked high screen time with poor mental health, but his work at the Digital Health Lab shows that this is a "two-way relationship" and poor mental health will lead to more screen use. Thereby worsening mental health.

"What we see here is that mental health issues precede screen use, not the other way around," Ritchie said. "Especially when you consider the impact of the pandemic on overall mental health and how anxiety and depression soared during the lockdown."

Excessive screen time is not only related to poor mental health, but also to poor physical health.

The 2020 study, also led by​​Nagata and published in the International Journal of Eating Disorders, calculated the weighted average of screen usage in a typical day, and found that every additional hour of total screen time per day increases the risk of overeating. 1.11. Eating disorders.

Every additional hour of social networking, texting and watching or streaming TV shows or movies are also significantly associated with bulimia.

"Teenagers who sit still in front of the screen are more likely to overeat," Nagata said.

Dr. Paul Weigle, chairman of the media committee of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, said that excessive use of screens can also affect sleep, regular meal times and physical activity, which are essential to a healthy lifestyle.

According to a survey conducted by the Digital Health Laboratory, parents report that their children use screen media more frequently in the summer compared to the 2020 school year. Rich said this upward trend continues until the 2021 school year, even though children and adolescents have fully resumed face-to-face learning.  

“We have obtained multiple data points and multiple studies that show that the digital environment is increasingly used, not only for learning and work, but also for entertainment, entertainment and social life,” he said.

However, experts recommend that parents monitor the quality of their children's screen time—not the quantity.

Rich said that screen time is not "intrinsically toxic." But if it starts to weaken academic performance, sleep and interpersonal relationships, this will become the case.

"We need to realize what it is replacing," he said. "One area of ​​the screen time problem is that you don't do anything when you are on the screen."

Rich recommends increasing non-screen time throughout the day instead of "the old idea of ​​limiting screen time." This can happen at the dining table, while doing homework, especially when sleeping.

Weigle recommends adjusting the settings of children’s phones and tablets so that they become inactive at certain times of day and night. If children complain about being bored, Rich said, let them feel bored.

"We didn't give boredom the space it needs, and boredom is where creativity and imagination happen," he said. "We need to bring back boredom"

Follow Adrianna Rodriguez on Twitter: @AdriannaUSAT. 

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