Week 5: Screens

Do phones, tablets and games consoles shape a generation?

Generation Z have been raised in a world of screens. The iPhone was launched in 2007, the iPad in 2010. By now, they and other brands are ubiquitous. There is no digital divide here. In fact the evidence seems to suggest that children brought up in economically disadvantaged families spend the greatest amount of time on their screens.

There is quite a head of steam urging public policy to restrict children’s access to some of the content. South Australia Premier Peter Malinauskas,^⁠1 is one of many legislators around the world seeking to ban social media for children. Then again, there was analogous anxiety in the 1970’s. The culprit then was television. The concern was a potential link with youth violence. That evaporated and most most of us glued to the gogglebox in our childhood have emerged as moderately disturbed as the next person.

But the downsides of modern screens are becoming widely recognised. You don’t have to be a member of Gen Z to feel the impact of screens on your attention and mood.^⁠2

Those backing a ban for children and young people can point to a growing evidence base on the negative effects. Some researchers, including Jonathan Haidt,^⁠3 speak in terms of a public health crisis. The subtitle of his book is ’the great rewiring’. He isn’t talking about the tech. He is talking about children’s brains.

Haidt argues that children have swopped a play based upbringing for a phone based upbringing, It means that, school apart, they have less face to face contact with friends. He also points to the screen’s potential to fragment attention. That, he suggests, leads to sleep deprivation.

And, as most of us have experienced, screens are addictive.

Puberty is the critical period. Fraught with chemical, physical and emotional turmoil, puberty is the moment when screens take hold.

But the evidence doesn’t all point in the same direction. Candice Odgers and Michaeline Jensen^⁠4 have reviewed the literature.

There is no dispute about the extraordinary amount of screen use across all generations. It is heightened in children and young people by “their need for affiliation, social approval and novelty seeking.”

But the impact on well being is not so clear. First, screens bring a lot of positives. It is how children kept on learning during the pandemic. Second, when evaluations uncover negative effects, which is not all of the time, those effects tend to be small. Third, there is the classic chicken and egg problem that comes with all data on associations. Are screens reducing social connection and creating anxiety or are anxious, socially isolated children and young people spending more time looking at their screens?

In a separate article, Odgers^⁠5 points to the confounding factors. As this substack has catalogued, Gen Z have experienced more risk averse parents. They have lived through a pandemic . They also felt, as children, the full brunt of the 2008 Global Financial Crash, which we will explore next week.

So what’s causing what? And how do screens fit into this story of change?

¹ See e.g.

² Bell, J., Radical Attention, 2023 Available online at: https://peninsulapress.co.uk/products/radical-attention

³ Haidt, J., The Anxious Generation, Allen Lane, 2024.

⁴ Odgers, C.L. and Jensen, M.R., Annual Research Review: Adolescent mental health in the digital age: facts, fears, and future directions. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 61: 336-348, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1111/jcpp.13190

⁵ Odgers, C.L., The great rewiring: is social media really behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness? Nature, 628, 29-30, 2024.