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Teens are spending nearly half their waking hours on screens
- maliker 7y agoJust wait until they start working. Screentime on macOS is showing me I'm looking at screens over 80% of my waking hours.
- HeWhoLurksLate 7y agoThat's what I was wondering- how does this compare to adults?
- saagarjha 7y agoScreen Time on macOS is very broken, FWIW. It thinks I used the App Store for four hours yesterday because I had left it open in the background during a build.
- maliker 7y agoYeah, the app level statistics are wrong. For the total screentime, it looks about right to me. 8 hours at work, a couple hours of email on either end, entertainment for an hour, then reading on a screen in bed.
- bobloblaw45 7y agoIt's like those dystopian heavy metal graphics of a feeble human with a screen strapped to their face. Back in the 80s and 90s they were thinking about televisions. People wasting their lives away being pacified by tv media while some faceless companies and government controlled the world. If they saw the world today it would probably blow their minds.
- self_awareness 7y agoWhy do people say: "on my mac" or "on my iphone" instead of "on my computer / on my phone"?
- maliker 7y agoIn this case to clarify that I was looking at a specific OS feature. It aggregates iOS and macOS usage data.
- stevewodil 7y agoI would think that this number would actually be higher than 'nearly' half. They are at school all day with laptops, and then I would imagine they go home and do homework, watch videos, and communicate with friends all using a screen. The only time away from screens is showering or playing a sport. For me, I would guess that I spend 13 hours a day looking at a screen. I think that's just modern life for a lot of people, especially those who work in tech.
- gmadsen 7y agothis excludes school work or studying
- saagarjha 7y ago> They are at school all day with laptops What school has their students be on laptops all day?!
- hanniabu 7y agoI know my local schools use tablets instead of textbooks.
- Aozi 7y agoActually here in Finland a lot of schools are moving towards laptops/tablets/etc. Kids as young as 9-10 are expected to use those devices. Books and materials are provided through online portals and downloaded locally on the machines. A lot of homework is done and returned online. Along with exams, essays and all kinds of other nonsense. As you get older most exams are done on Linux distro called DigabiOS (https://github.com/digabi/digabi-os https://github.com/digabi/digabi-os) the same distro is also used for the matriculation exams. You boot this off of a USB drive and hope it works well with your own machine. So I can absolutely see people spending most of their school day on a computer staring at a screen.
- breakbread 7y agoSomewhat off-topic. I recently rewatched Neon Genesis Evangelion and noticed that in many of the classroom scenes all of the kids had laptops. The anime aired in 1995/1996, but was set in 2015.
- tasuki 7y agoGood for them - that's much less than I do!
- snaky 7y agoAnd Google AR glasses still failed.
- rb808 7y agoSo less than adults then?
- rlv-dan 7y agoScreen time really needs to be sorted into meaningful, productive usage, and recreation and procrastination.
- ineedasername 7y agoAnd not just a general "recreation", but broken down further into something like videos/video games/social media.
- mikestew 7y agoOr allow me to make my own categories based on apps. Here's an extreme example: meditation timer. All I need you to do is ring a bell after 30 minutes, otherwise I'm meditating and obviously not looking at anything but the wall. So I'd like $TIMER_APP to not count toward screen time. Instead, it racks up 30 minutes every day toward that number. Does the yoga app that I throw to the Apple TV count? I guess it does. Should it count? Depends on what I'm trying to measure. If Screen Time is a measure of "sitting on my ass swiping at a piece of glass", then no, yoga time is not Screen Time. But it's early days, perhaps they'll refine it into a more useful feature. Now, Screen Time does do what you're asking. Screen Time/See All Activity/Show Categories. It's not perfect. Messages shows up as "social networking". Okay, if that's what you want to call "telling my wife I'm not dead in a ditch" and "hey, neighbor kid, wanna walk dogs with me?" But's it what we've got, and it's better than what we had.
- zipwitch 7y agoHere's a 2018 article specifically on tv-watching time over years: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/when-did-tv-watching-peak/561464/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/when-... For comparison, here's a 2004 paper on how teens spent their time from 1981-2003: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-w47wgdhso https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-w47wgdhso (Short version: about 5 hours a day on tv, games, and computers.) And, let us not forget when, in 1959, Scientific American denounced the vile scourge of chess: "A pernicious excitement to learn and play chess has spread all over the country, and numerous clubs for practicing this game have been formed in cities and villages...chess is a mere amusement of a very inferior character, which robs the mind of valuable time that might be devoted to nobler acquirements, while it affords no benefit whatever to the body." https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/19th-century-concern-trollingchess-mere-amusement-very-inferior-character-180953281/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/19th-century-conce... Speaking for myself, I'm not thrilled at the amount of screen time I and others spend... but the same has been said of various forms of print media and other things over the years; http://mentalfloss.com/article/52209/15-historical-complaints-about-young-people-ruining-everything http://mentalfloss.com/article/52209/15-historical-complaint... I doubt medieval crafters were thrilled about spending 10-14 hours a day in their workshops either. Ultimately, I think self-awareness is more important than anything, including how information-selecting creations like Youtube or Facebook are affecting our minds and our ideas, rather than focusing so much on time.
- brianwawok 7y agoIt's real bad. Delay getting kids a phone as long as possible.
- ceejayoz 7y agoMeh. We just limit mindless apps. Seeing eight kids organize a playdate via text message and then do some collaborative building with redstone circuitry in Minecraft is pretty impressive to watch, and makes me strongly feel there's more to the debate than just "screens vs. non-screens".
- hntddt1 7y agoIs that a bad thing?
- hombre_fatal 7y agoTFA goes into more detail than the title.
- ineedasername 7y agoThe article touches on the type of screen time when it says the time cited is in addition to that for school, but the non-school screen time is not broken down into other buckets. I would expect a significant difference between kids whose primary screen time was videogames vs. videos vs. social media.
- tiborsaas 7y agoTeens are spending nearly half their waking hours on reading, communicating, creating content and embracing the digital world around them
- 908087 7y agoMost of them are actually scrolling through endless advertisements and clicking thumb icons.
- odiroot 7y agoI'm over thirty and I probably spend 12+h on screens every day. That's par for the course when you work "with computers". The rest is Kindle and my smartphone. I can imagine, people who are heavily invested into social networks probably take it up to even 15h.
- JDiculous 7y agoAs an adult I must spend at least 80+% of my time staring at a screen, but I'm guessing that will never be diagnosed as a problem and get its own article because nobody cares when it comes to adults?
- rexpop 7y agoRight–that would be an indictment of the workplace, which is anathema in the US, especially on this forum.
- dev_dull 7y agoI think the issue is that the 50% screen time for teens is using apps that cause and reinforce anxiety and other diagnosable mental health issues. The teens by virtue of their age probably aren’t working, so I don’t that screen tune can be attributed to work requirements.
- moneil971 7y agoSome have screens at school (Chromebooks or iPads), but even then, their weekdays should largely be screen free - which means they’re getting these hours in nights and weekends.
- rexpop 7y ago> I think the issue is that the 50% screen time for teens is using apps that cause and reinforce anxiety and other diagnosable mental health issues. Like Slack and Jira?
- sh-run 7y agoAssuming someone sleeps 8 hours a night and spends 100% of their 40 hour a week job in front of a computer and no other time in front of a screen, that's about 36% of an adult's waking hours. My total screen time is higher than that, but that's largely my fault (although I do work 50+ hours a few weeks out of the year). If you work in tech your going to spend a lot of time in front of screens, likewise fishing guides spend a lot of time staring at water.
- MrGilbert 7y agoTeens are hunting for likes and streaks (Snapchat, I hear you) - sharing photos of themself with a ton of filter applied. And at the end, they are unable to look at themself in the mirror, because they feel ugly, and reality doesn't fit to the reality on their screens. This is a first-hand experience I have with my 17 year old foster child. I don't know how she grew up, but I see the results social media is doing to her self-esteem. My gf and I, both in our mid-30s, know how this works and are able to work against it as best as we can. But other parents, which are 10, 15 years older - I can understand that it's difficult for them to grasp the consequences, as they are also caught in the social media loop.
- cageface 7y agoI’ve seen the same thing in people this age. It’s really tragic how social media is shredding the self esteem of kids of this generation, especially girls. I’m really glad I grew up before this happened.
- andreshb 7y agoI wish that was the case for me
- munmaek 7y agoI spend the vast majority of my day staring at my phone or my monitor. I work in tech. I don't use social media besides ~1-2m on instagram every other day. I consume media/news through the financial times, reddit, HN, and youtube. I also play chess via apps daily, and other games from time to time. The rest of the time I'm either doing something physical like cooking/cleaning/walking, or reading a book (not on my kindle). For teens, half is pretty good. For younger kids though I can see it as a problem.
- SolaceQuantum 7y agoI don't know what the difference is between this and the back-in-the-day children reading too much in fantasy novels and comic books...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- justinjlynn 7y agoSame old moral panic, different technology. Still, different technology means potentially different effects. That still doesn't mean it's any less of the same old moral panic. Fortunately, as it always seems in these cases, people are looking into it - for better or worse. Perhaps it's indivisible.
- ryandrake 7y agoWhen I grew up it was over Dungeons and Dragons. Then it was video games. Now it’s these nebulous “screens” that are supposedly turning kids into... something? The constant is: When kids are interested in things that parents weren’t interested in when they were kids, pearl clutching ensues.
- sh-run 7y agoI'm 28 and spent a lot of my childhood playing video games (N64, GameCube and later Xbox 360) and reading. I still play video games and read as an adult (although much less often due to work and personal obligations). I have also gone through periods where I waste tons of time on social media. Social Media is mostly mindless, it makes me think negative thoughts about my neighbors and friends, it makes me want to go out and spend money on things I don't need and I get caught in this cycle where I feel like I constantly need to check it. Fortunately, I recognize this and its not a problem any more but its a very easy trap to fall into. Books and video games have never made me feel this way.
- Nasrudith 7y agoI hate to say it but social media's issues sound like related to other people and sick social dynamics which all too often establish themselves. Keeping up with the Joneses and veblen goods are things which cause people to spend money on things they don't need and lead to negative thoughts about neighbors and friends over them being "too good" and provoking envy oe "not good enough" and provoking scorn.
- hsnewman 7y agoThe title is misleading. It's not all teens, it's some teens.
- gnode 7y ago> Those children were more likely to become depressed by age 12 or 13, to be the victims of bullying, to be aggressive, to have lower interpersonal skills, to have unhealthy diets, and to be overweight, the researchers found in the April study. > The findings suggest that very young children are missing out on key aspects of their brain development when they spend so much time staring at a screen instead of interacting with the outside world. Or alternatively, they suggest that victims of bullying, less socially successful, and less physically fit children are more inclined to spend time using a screen. So often studies like this find a correlation, then jump to the causation they had set out to find, ignoring all other plausible relationships suggested by the data.
- McWobbleston 7y agoRight, all of the factors they mentioned seem like the kinds of things that would make screen time more fulfilling or engaging compared to time with others or something else.