Researchers at the Yale Child Study Center say the real question with teenagers and screens isn’t how many hours they log but what they’re doing while they’re logged on.
“It’s a mixed picture, and that’s important to sit with,” Jessica Hoffmann, PhD, assistant professor at the Yale Child Study Center and director of research for the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, told Yale Medicine.
The study, which drew on survey data from 6,629 adolescents, found that teens who used the most technology reported both stronger positive and stronger negative emotions than lighter users. Those positive feelings showed up most reliably around one activity in particular: video games.
That kind of nuance is worth sitting with for Movieguide® readers navigating a media landscape that rarely hands parents easy answers. Movieguide® has previously reported on research suggesting screens do their worst damage less through the minutes logged than through what those minutes push out — sleep, conversation and unstructured play.
“It’s more complex than it seems,” Hoffmann said. “It’s important to know what exactly are they doing? Why are they logging on? Are they lonely? Are they bored? Our question was: was that need met, or did you feel worse?”
Creating or browsing social media, by contrast, was the activity most associated with negative emotions in the study. Former US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy warned in a 2023 advisory that social media carries real risks for adolescents, including anxiety, depression, lower self-esteem and disrupted sleep.
Related: New Research Gives Parents Another Reason to Rethink Screen Time
Other research backs up those concerns. A January study of more than 45,000 US children and adolescents in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications tied heavy screen use to higher rates of anxiety and depression, and a Preventing Chronic Disease study published last year found teens logging four or more hours of non-school screen time daily were more likely to struggle with poor sleep, inadequate exercise, weight concerns and thin social support.
Hoffmann doesn’t dispute those findings, but she cautions against treating all screen time the same. Modern video games are more sophisticated than critics often assume, she said, and the internet gives isolated teenagers a way to find people who share their unusual interests.
“I would like us to try to embrace the complexity of screen time and internet access,” Hoffmann said. “There are kids where no one in their community is like them. They have found like-minded people on the internet, and that is hugely beneficial to their mental health.”
Rather than tracking minutes, Hoffmann encourages parents to ask their teenagers what they’re doing online and how it makes them feel afterward. Fill a teenager’s day with sleep, school, friendship and a hobby first, she said, and there’s little room left for screens to crowd out.
“If you fill your day with all the things that are healthy for you — you get enough sleep, eat breakfast, go to school, get outside with friends or do a hobby — there are really not that many minutes left to do screen time,” Hoffmann said. “So, fill the bucket with all the healthy stuff first.”
For Christian families already wrestling with what their kids watch and scroll, that’s a familiar principle wearing new research: cultivate character and connection first, and screens naturally shrink to their proper size. Movieguide® will keep watching what the data — and plain common sense — tell parents next.
Read Next: Do You Know How Much Screen Time Is Appropriate for Your Child?
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