I believe that the triple threats of modern life are sleep, screens and sugar. And that my job as a parent to two children, now 10 and 12, is to teach them how to manage the siren call of YouTube shorts and the seductive wink of the biscuit tin.
My children have had an iPad each since they were about three, with boundaries set up around their use. Neither of my children has an iPhone or a gaming console (mostly because I’m the one who would have to be constantly troubleshooting it). Screen rules in our house go like this: on a school night, about 1.5hrs in the evening after dinner and bath. On the weekend, 1.5hrs after lunch on top of this. On a long car journey, iPads come out an hour before the journey is due to end. If it’s a wet weekend and I’m in a funk and we’re at a loose end, the sky’s the limit.
Both children can read and write and are generally doing fine. But still, I worry. Perhaps those parents who ban the screens entirely are right! Perhaps my children are slowly turning their brains into gum, or being radicalised to some dangerous ideology that doesn’t even have a name yet. I certainly know that on the one pyjama day that they are allowed per school holiday, when they stay indoors and binge on screens, they are genuinely dizzy and sick by the end.
But it turns out, I’m wrong to worry! As is every other parent who battles with these anxieties. Last week, the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), a research centre with links to Oxford’s Balliol College, declared that “there is no evidence that screen time harms children’s thinking abilities or wellbeing”.
Professor Andrew Przybylski, who oversaw the study, said: “There’s been a widely held view, globally, that the introduction of the internet and smartphones has been bad for people of all ages, and for young people in particular – that there’s been a global mental health epidemic.
“But nobody’s shown that this is the case and until now, it’s just been assumed.”
Well, that’s that then. Kids! Fire up Grand Theft Auto! But wait. If the internet is just fine, why is it that other research offers such a different perspective?
In the last week alone, work from the University of York showed that too much screen time damages imaginative powers. Professor Sebastian Suggate, from York, found that “over a longer period of time, days or years of consistently consuming images on screen this could have a significant impact on the brain’s ability to mentally visualise”.
The Molly Rose Foundation also found that “substantial amounts of harmful material remain readily accessible and discoverable, including posts that promote and glorify suicide and self-harm”. And I can’t help always mentally referring back to the class action lawsuit in America suing Meta (formerly Facebook) for, it claims, hooking children with addictive software.
My friend Marta, whose husband is deputy head of a large mixed boarding school, texts to reassure me that I’m onto something: “Screen time and social media are the biggest threat to teenage happiness and success without a doubt”.
So what are parents to do? In times of parental uncertainty such as these I turn to mothers with older children for advice and a longer view. My friend Serena’s children are now in their twenties, but in their early teens the battles at home over screens were epic. Now they have left home, how does she feel about those historical battles? “I regret the squabbles and rigidity more than I regret the screen time,” she says. “In hindsight, it feels like it was more important to prepare them for a life of autonomy where they have to make all those decisions for themselves than to carefully manage their intake, but it took me a long time to understand that.”
Sounds good so far. “Clueless adults trying to combat a whole industry dedicated to getting us all to look at our screens 24/7 cannot win. We just can’t – it’s not a fair fight. So working within the possible, I think you end up trying to have conversations about precisely that: about the attention economy, algorithms, what makes TikTok so seductive,” adds Serena.
This is a key point. Parental fear and guilt is a particularly potent emotion and perspective can sometimes get filtered out. All the parents of older children I spoke to – even the ones whose children seemed terrifyingly hooked on their PS4 aged 15 – grew up to be helpful, engaged adults who are nice to their friends, have jobs and go camping. And yet, keeping a weather eye on all aspects of your child’s development, not just their tech consumption, is non-negotiable.
Dr Lucy Brown-Wright is a Chartered Psychologist specialising in neurodevelopment and education. Sure, she says, many people have no problems when it comes to using the internet, but some really do. “Platforms including Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram use the same neural circuitry that gambling and recreational drugs do,” she points out. “Social media provides infinite rewards in the form of attention from others for relatively minimal effort in brains that are young and developing.
“Usually people talk about themselves 30 to 40 percent of the time. This changes on social media, when people talk about themselves up to 80 percent of the time.” The more time children are habituated to ‘broadcast’ rather than ‘receive’, she says, is going to give them an uneven idea of what makes a healthy relationship. The danger is that when they start finding no joy from other people, that sends them back to the dopamine hit of the internet and on a possible downward spiral.”
The OII study was huge, monitoring people aged 15 to 89, in 168 countries from 2005 up until now. In amongst so many people and with that much data, those people, (and we all know one or two), with a serious case of internet poisoning may well be a rounding error. But they are not a rounding error to their parents, their friends or their spouses.
So while it’s good to know that, broadly speaking, the internet hasn’t been sent to destroy the world, in our house it is not going to be open season on the Xbox just yet.