Month: September 2019

Shortly after the publication of my book on the psychology of video games, I was invited to the Annapolis Book Festival to be part of the “Video Games” panel: useful tool or harmful distraction? My witness list and I wanted to address the debate about video games and other on-screen moments by discussing the benefits of video games and how they might help children if parents were involved and informed. One of the dominant ideas in the literature about screen time is the “delay hypothesis. “It’s just the idea that when children spend time in front of screens, other activities are removed from their daily lives. The authors collected information from a frankly ridiculous number of young people in Britain, allowing more than 120,000 young people to spend time on the screen and achieve their mental well-being. A final comment on this study was that even outside of these tipping points, the impact of screen use was low: d = -0.18. This means that screen use beyond the tipping point represented less than 1% of the variability in a child’s mental well-being. The fact is that, given the way in which central digital devices work, play, socialize and communicate, there is nothing monolithic called “screen time” that replaces other, more useful activities. In fact, children can be expected to be disadvantaged in a number of ways if they do not reach the screen at some point. In fact, they found evidence to support the slope hypothesis, where mental well-being decreased with little screen use, some increased with a certain amount, and then began to decrease. In fact, the researchers were able to give empirical “tipping points” where screen use had been beneficial until now, but then led to further decline. Most studies and many other parents treated “their” time on the screen in the same way as another child who had just played fourteen hours for five hours. They examined different types of screen use, including television or video, video games, general computer use and use of smart phones. It’s not unreasonable to wonder how long on the screen might affect children’s well-being. You’re not alone with “your” concerns. A 2015 study of children in the United Kingdom showed that the time children spend online has more than doubled, from an average of 8 hours a week to nearly 19 hours a week in just 10 years. Others also complained that their children spent too much time in front of a screen.