Healthy Habits: Good News About Screen Time

State and local governments have implemented social distancing and stay-at-home mandates to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, which has increased screen time for children. Parents may worry about their kids having more screen time while they're at home during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Chris Ferguson, PhD, professor of psychology at Stetson University, is a media effects, video game and virtual reality expert. Dr. Ferguson says that additional screen time during social distancing isn't bad for children.

• We have generally gone too far in frightening parents about screen time.
• There is little evidence screens directly cause harm to youth.
• The most important thing is to make sure screen use is balanced with adequate sleep, exercise and school work.
• There is no magic number of screen hours. Particularly now, so as long as kids are otherwise getting needs met, parents don't need to restrict screens to a certain number of hours.
• If anything, right now, screens can really help kids stay in contact with their friends, feel like they've got some control and just stay away from boredom.

I had a chance to interview him to learn more.
Why are people concerned about screen time use?
Well I think that scholars and some professional guilds like the American Academy of Pediatrics (who, I should note, are a guild, not a science organization) have done an excellent job frightening and shaming parents as much as they can, mainly as a means of promoting their own interests. Until recently, parents were told to hold screen time to only 2 hours a day (to their credit the AAP removed that guideline in 2016). News media play a role in this too with scary headlines of screens destroying generations or causing suicide, just as back in the day, parents were frightened with claims that listening to rock music would lead to Satanism.
Why are some of the concerns overblown?
Well, there's just not good evidence for the scary claims. By and large evidence does not suggest that screen time is an important contributor to children's mental health or cognitive development. Sometimes a study might find a tiny, trivial correlation, but often these go away once other things are controlled. As scholars, we can spot that, but unfortunately, the general public only gets exposed to the scariest interpretations that make their way through university press releases into newspaper headlines where scary is what gets attention.
How can screen time be helpful for kids and teens, especially during a time of more physical distancing?
One of the things screens are really good at is providing a platform for social interaction. When face-to-face (ftf) interaction was available, it's natural for parents to prefer kids have ftf time with peers. Now, that's largely gone. So screens are now an excellent mode by which kids can interact with their peers when they don't have the opportunity for ftf time. Trying to limit that to a small number of hours could actually do more harm than good. That's particularly true for teens who, as a natural part of their development, are trying to distance themselves from family, and attaching to peer groups more.
How can parents model responsible use of technology and screens?
First off, parents can relax and forget all the scary stuff they've heard. Usually they can assume if a recommendation came from the American Academy of Pediatrics, the opposite thing is true. There are no magic number of hours that are "bad" for kids when it comes to screens. Rather, it's about balance. Screen use needs to be balanced with adequate daily exercise, adequate sleep, and making sure kids are keeping up with their responsibilities as they return to school (mostly virtual school and those screen hours should not be considered equivalent to recreational screen hours). Parents, of course, can model the same, making sure they're not overindulging with screens as well, and keeping everything in a reasonable balance.