Millions of parents around the world are wondering if they can give their youngest daughter a smartphone for her tenth birthday, allow their 13-year-old to follow friends and influencers on Instagram or limit video game time for their eldest high school student.. To the recurring and often passionate debate concerning the vices and virtues of children’s exposure to screens, a study published Monday, November 13 in the journal Natural Human Behavior provides measured conclusions, based on the exploitation of a large mass of data.
The team led by Taren Sanders, researcher at the Institute of Positive Psychology and Education at the Australian Catholic University, conducted a so-called “umbrella” study, a meta-analysis of work which is itself meta-analyses of scientific studies. The one hundred and two meta-analyses considered had themselves screened 2,451 studies involving, in total, no less than 1.9 million participants.
Main lesson from this review of the scientific literature: whether positive or negative, the phenomena highlighted are intensity “low to moderate”. Researchers are careful not to say that such use causes such effect, and only speak of correlations. Contacted by The world, Taren Sanders regrets this difficulty in highlighting causal links. “For example, does social media promote depression, or are depressed people more likely to turn to screens? Hard to say from the evidence we have”he explains.
Decline in learning abilities
Staying in the field of statistical correlations, the use of screens in general, television in particular, as well as video games, goes hand in hand with a decline in learning abilities. On the other hand, the use of digital books with a narrative dimension as well as education programs involving touching the screen or using augmented reality are associated with an increase in these capacities. This is also the case when it comes to learning to calculate, not only digital educational tools, but also video games involving operations with numbers.
The study confirms the importance of taking into account the way screens are used, which clearly appears in the area of literacy. Indeed, difficulties in learning to read and write are associated with the use of screens in general; however, if the child watches with another person, especially one of his parents, a positive correlation appears – as long as the two spectators lend themselves to an active exchange, according to Taren Sanders.
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