Screen time and children: from homo erectus to gamer, and what the science really says

Or: why you probably need to worry far less than the internet would have you believe and what does count.

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Maybe you recognise this image.

A cartoon: an ape, homo erectus, an early human, a modern human. And then, on the far right, hunched on a little stool in front of a TV: a gamer.

Ten years ago I still found that cartoon simply funny. Now, with two teenagers in the house, it smiles at me rather differently.

Because maybe you recognise this, too.

You get home at half past five. You cook, you lay the table, and you call upstairs: “Dinner’s ready!” Two shadows appear at the top of the stairs. Each takes a plate. “Love you, Mum.” A big kiss on your cheek. And off they go again, up the stairs, to their room, to the screen.

You smile. Because that love you was real. So was the kiss. You still have two happy, hard-working, loving boys. But imagine standing in front of your own father or grandfather in their day, plate of food in hand, announcing you’d be eating upstairs “because busy”. The reaction would probably have been a very different one.

Has something changed? Has something been lost? Or are we seeing something through cartoon-tinted glasses that looks different from how it really is?

Time for a deep dive. With science, history and a smile.

The panic isn’t new. The panic is very old.

Around 370 BC, Plato wrote that writing would be a disaster for the young. Writing, yes: simply setting words down on a surface. In his dialogue Phaedrus he has Socrates argue that writing would undermine the memory we carry in our heads, that people would come to think they knew a great deal while in truth they remembered nothing, and that real wisdom would fade away.¹

He wasn’t entirely wrong. Our memory for loose facts has indeed declined since we started writing them down. He had only forgotten that we gained something far greater in return: libraries, science, knowledge that can travel across centuries and borders.

After that came the panic over novels (in the eighteenth century they would “make women hysterical”), over the radio (it would make children “addicted”), over television (it would kill the imagination), over comics, over rock ‘n’ roll, over video games. Every generation of parents has stared open-mouthed at what their children were clutching and thought: this is different. This one’s going wrong.

So far, one way or another, it has always turned out fine.

What does present-day science say?

Here I want to admit something to you: the science on screens and young people is far less solid than the scare stories suggest.

In 2019, Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski of the University of Oxford published a major study in Nature Human Behaviour. They combined data from over 350,000 young people across three large datasets, using a rigorous method (specification curve analysis) that stops minuscule chance effects from being dressed up as ‘evidence’. Their conclusion: the link between screen time and teenagers’ well-being is negative, but it explains at most 0.4 per cent of the differences between young people.² That is very little. For comparison: whether a teenager eats breakfast regularly or sleeps enough has a far larger effect on their well-being than how much screen time they get.

Two years earlier, Andrew Przybylski and Netta Weinstein found something even more interesting, what they called the “Goldilocks hypothesis”. No screen use at all turned out to be no better than moderate screen use. In fact, children who used screens one to two hours a day scored higher on some psychosocial measures than children who used no screens at all.³ Only at a great many hours a day did the picture begin to tilt.

That doesn’t mean screens are harmless. It means the amount on its own says far less than we think. What a teenager does with that time, who they’re in contact with, whether they sleep and move enough, those are the real variables.

Meanwhile a fierce academic debate is raging around Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation, published in 2024, which argues that smartphones are causing a mental-health crisis among the young.⁴ Psychologist Candice Odgers of UC Irvine wrote a razor-sharp review in Nature.⁵ The evidence, she argues, is far weaker than Haidt suggests. The real causes of mental-health problems in young people probably lie in poverty, violence, loneliness and structural inequality, not in screens alone.

To be honest: the debate isn’t settled. But one thing is clear: the simple conclusion “screens = ruin” doesn’t hold up scientifically.

What does deserve attention

Not everything is rosy. This is what is genuinely on the table.

• Sleep. Screens right before bed can delay falling asleep. A systematic review of 67 studies found an unfavourable link between screen time and sleep in nine out of ten studies, mostly shorter sleep and later bedtimes.⁶ Important: that is an association, not a proven cause. And blue light probably matters less than we assumed. A Cochrane review of seventeen randomised trials found no convincing evidence that blue-light filtering spectacle lenses improve sleep quality.⁷ What keeps the mind alert is most likely the content itself.
• Displaced activity. Time is a vessel with a bottom. If a lot of time goes to screens, less time goes to moving, being outdoors and face-to-face contact. This is arithmetic, not a research finding. But the loss can be real.
• Comparison and self-image. In a British cohort study of nearly 11,000 fourteen-year-olds, heavy social media use was linked to more depressive symptoms, and that link was stronger for girls than for boys.⁸ The researchers found several intervening pathways: online harassment, poorer sleep, lower self-esteem and dissatisfaction with one’s own body. Here too: association, not proven cause.
• Posture. And here the nuance belongs straight away. Text neck, spending hours bent forward over a phone, is treated online as an epidemic. Yet a scoping review of 41 publications concluded that there is no scientific evidence that the posture itself causes neck pain.⁹ What the body really does tolerate badly is sitting still in the same position for hours, whatever that position is. A teenager who walks a lap now and then is better off than one with zero screen time who sits in a chair for eight hours.

All real. All manageable with ordinary family agreements. None of it a reason to panic.

The real story in your house

Here I want to pause.

In your story, your sons come downstairs when you call. They take the food that you have cooked. They look at you. They say I love you. They give you a kiss.

That is no small event. That is a ritual.

Family psychologist Barbara Fiese and her colleagues reviewed fifty years of research into family routines and family rituals. Their distinction is a useful one. A routine is what you do. A ritual is what it means. The form shifts with each generation and each culture, the meaning stays.¹⁰ Our grandmothers sat with our mothers at the table with soup and silence. Our mothers sat with us on the sofa with the television murmuring in the background. You stand in the kitchen while your children carry their plates upstairs and catch your eye on the stairs for a moment.

Three forms. One function: I see you. I feed you. I know that you know I’m here.

The cartoon from homo erectus to gamer is funny because it captures something true: a posture, an isolation, that one moment when you do indeed think where on earth are we heading. But the cartoon is also misleading. It pretends something has been lost, while in your house something still exists that is the foundation of every parent-child relationship that has ever existed.

Love up a flight of stairs is still love.

What the cartoon forgets to draw

Maybe we should be honest: if that cartoon is right, then something was lost at every previous leap. When we stood upright, we lost the ability to climb quickly into trees. When we took up farming, we lost the variety of hunting and gathering. When we got books, we lost our oral memory.

And yet none of us would want to go back.

Maybe our children aren’t the end-point figure in a tragic little cartoon. Maybe they’re simply, just as we once were to our parents, something we can’t quite place yet. Something that looks strange from a distance, but is surprisingly recognisable up close.

Because don’t forget: they see us too. And they may well be worrying about us. About how we stand in the kitchen after a long working day, too tired to do anything but cook and tidy up. About how much time we spend scrolling on our phones. About how we forget our own passwords, while they effortlessly remember entire song lyrics.

Maybe somewhere, in their own cartoon, they’re drawing an upright mother behind a stove as the final figure. Maybe they call her modern parent. And maybe they’re smiling too, because they love her so much.

A question to carry with you

Think of a small ritual between you and your children, or, long ago, between you and your parents. Something that looks insignificant from the outside: a glance, a word, a touch, a daily sentence.

What would you lose if that small moment didn’t happen tomorrow and what does that tell you about what it really is?

Related reading

• A Mother Kisses Her Baby in an MRI
• Why Your Brain Is Never Satisfied
• The Desire Path in Your Mind

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Sources

The numbers in the text refer to this list.

1. Plato. (1999). Phaedrus (B. Jowett, Trans.). Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1636 (Original work written c. 370 BCE)
2. Orben, A., & Przybylski, A. K. (2019). The association between adolescent well-being and digital technology use. Nature Human Behaviour, 3(2), 173–182. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0506-1
3. Przybylski, A. K., & Weinstein, N. (2017). A large-scale test of the Goldilocks hypothesis: Quantifying the relations between digital-screen use and the mental well-being of adolescents. Psychological Science, 28(2), 204–215. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797616678438
4. Haidt, J. (2024). The anxious generation: How the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. Penguin Press.
5. Odgers, C. L. (2024). The great rewiring: Is social media really behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness? Nature, 628(8006), 29–30. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-00902-2
6. Hale, L., & Guan, S. (2015). Screen time and sleep among school-aged children and adolescents: A systematic literature review. Sleep Medicine Reviews, 21, 50–58. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.smrv.2014.07.007
7. Singh, S., Keller, P. R., Busija, L., McMillan, P., Makrai, E., Lawrenson, J. G., Hull, C. C., & Downie, L. E. (2023). Blue-light filtering spectacle lenses for visual performance, sleep, and macular health in adults. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 8(8), Article CD013244. https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD013244.pub2
8. Kelly, Y., Zilanawala, A., Booker, C., & Sacker, A. (2019). Social media use and adolescent mental health: Findings from the UK Millennium Cohort Study. EClinicalMedicine, 6, 59–68. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eclinm.2018.12.005
9. Grasser, T., Borges Dario, A., Parreira, P. C. S., Correia, I. M. T., & Meziat-Filho, N. (2023). Defining text neck: A scoping review. European Spine Journal, 32(10), 3463–3484. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00586-023-07821-2
10. Fiese, B. H., Tomcho, T. J., Douglas, M., Josephs, K., Poltrock, S., & Baker, T. (2002). A review of 50 years of research on naturally occurring family routines and rituals: Cause for celebration? Journal of Family Psychology, 16(4), 381–390. https://doi.org/10.1037/0893-3200.16.4.381

Sources on this site are cited in APA style, with a DOI wherever one exists. Why I made that choice →

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Disclaimer: This blog is about scientific research into screen use and young people’s well-being. It is not medical or parenting advice. If you are seriously worried about your child’s mental well-being, gaming behaviour or screen use, talk to your GP, your child’s doctor or a child psychologist.