The tablet came out one Tuesday so dinner could get made. It worked beautifully. And it’s been there every Tuesday since, and most Wednesdays, and lately a Sunday or two.
That was a reasonable decision, made by a tired person with a stove on. Before you carry it around as a worry, look at what the data says.
A review of 58 studies with 480,000 participants found that total screen time showed no relationship with academic performance. What did show up alongside poorer performance was watching television and playing video games. So the useful question shifts from how many hours to which screen.
This touches several of ten reasons a child won’t read, starting with the time of day.
How much screen time is too much?
There’s an answer that rearranges the question.
A team at Universitat Jaume I in Castellón, Spain, reviewed 58 studies from 23 countries with 480,000 participants aged 4 to 18. Thirty of those studies, covering 106,000 participants, went into a meta-analysis.
The headline result, in their words: “the amount of time spent on overall screen media use was not associated with academic performance.” The measured effect was −0.29, with a confidence interval that crosses zero, from −0.65 to 0.08 (Adelantado-Renau et al., JAMA Pediatrics, 2019).
And the second result, which always travels with the first. Television viewing was linked with lower composite scores (−0.19, from −0.29 to −0.09), and so was video game playing (−0.15, from −0.22 to −0.08).
What “associated” means. That the two things show up together in the data.
Television may take time away from other things. Houses where the TV is on more may have other things going on, too. Children who are having a harder time at school may reach for more television. The study measures the company the two keep, and leaves the direction open.
What a family can do with that: stop counting hours and start looking at which ones.
Which screen actually competes with the book
Out of the distinction that study draws comes a table a household can use:
| Screen | How it behaves next to a book |
|---|---|
| TV on in the background | The one most linked to poorer performance, and the one nobody really chose |
| Long, open-ended video game session | Linked as well. The session with no natural end is what swallows the afternoon |
| Short game with a clear end of round | It finishes on its own, and leaves a gap afterward |
| Short videos on autoplay | No natural end. The format closest to background TV |
| Screens with text: chat, subtitles, articles | That’s reading, and it counts |
| Audiobook, or a book on a screen | Reading, in different bodywork |
The row that changes a house the most is the first one: background TV is the only screen nobody decided to turn on. It’s also the easiest to turn off, because nobody is watching it.
The screen that reads
Part of screen time is reading.
Subtitles on a show, the family group chat, the wiki page about the game, the article about their team: all of that is text a child is decoding, at speed, by choice, for a reason they care about. It’s the same argument as for graphic novels, which count as reading.
Say it out loud at home. The household tally of “time reading” almost never includes any of it, and the household tally of “time on screens” almost always does. The same twenty minutes get filed in the wrong column twice.
There’s a practical consequence. A child who reads three thousand words of game wiki on a Saturday morning has done something the reading log will never show, and something that behaves, as far as vocabulary goes, a good deal more like a book than like a cartoon. That’s curiosity doing its job on whatever it found.
What to change first, if anything
No stopwatch, and no grand family negotiation. One concrete thing at a time:
- Turn off the background one. The TV nobody is watching is the cheapest change, and the least argued about.
- Change one slot before touching the whole day. Half an hour, say before dinner, with the whole house off screens. The grown-ups’ phones included.
- Prefer what ends on its own. A round with an end, one episode, a ten-minute video. What finishes leaves a gap; what runs on takes the afternoon.
- Put the book where the screen was, in the same slot and just as close to a hand. If it takes getting up to find it, the book loses. A little reading corner helps here.
- Offer a format that competes on equal terms. An audiobook in the car, a comic on the table, a word game at dinner. What each format does, and the evidence behind it has more on each.
And a note on time, the resource underneath all of this: how much reading time is actually enough has its own article, with the table from the study that produced the famous figure, here.
About the guilt
Someone who puts on a screen so they can cook is solving a real problem with the tool at hand, at seven in the evening, after a whole day.
Competing with a device designed by large teams to hold attention is hard, and the outcome of that contest says very little about a family. The finding above backs that up: across 480,000 participants, total screen time showed no relationship with school performance.
What’s within reach is smaller and more specific: one slot, one screen, and a book closer to a hand than the remote.
Where to start
This week, turn off the background TV and leave a book on the table where the remote usually sits. Nothing else. If someone opens it by the third afternoon, you have your answer.
And if the screen turns out to be the excuse and the cause lives somewhere else, there are nine more reasons in the ten, from the cheapest to rule out to the slowest to change.
Where these numbers come from
- Adelantado-Renau, Mireia, and coauthors, Universitat Jaume I, Castellón, “Association Between Screen Media Use and Academic Performance Among Children and Adolescents: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis,” JAMA Pediatrics 173(11), 1058, 2019. DOI 10.1001/jamapediatrics.2019.3176. Figures taken from the article abstract. Source
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