The screen went on one Tuesday so dinner could get finished. It worked, and it has been there every Tuesday since, and some Wednesdays.
That was a reasonable decision, and it is worth knowing what the data says before carrying it around.
A review of 58 studies with 480,000 participants found that total screen time tracked no relationship with academic performance. What did show up associated with poorer performance was watching television and playing video games. So the useful question stops being how many hours and becomes which screen.
This cuts across several of ten reasons someone won’t read, starting with the sixth: the hour.
How much screen time is too much?
There is an answer that rearranges the question.
A team at Universitat Jaume I in Castellón reviewed 58 studies from 23 countries with 480,000 participants aged 4 to 18. Thirty of them — 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: −0.65 to 0.08 (Adelantado-Renau et al., JAMA Pediatrics, 2019).
And the second result, which travels with the first. Television viewing was inversely associated with 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 with more television on may have other things going on too. Children 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 can be done 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 |
|---|---|
| Television on in the background | The one most associated with poorer performance, and the one least decided on |
| Long, open-ended video game session | Associated as well. The session with no natural end is what eats the afternoon |
| Short game with an end of round | It finishes by itself, and leaves a gap afterwards |
| Short video on autoplay | No natural end. The format closest to background television |
| Screens with text: chat, subtitles, articles | That is reading, and it counts |
| Audiobook or reading on a screen | Reading, different bodywork |
The row that changes a house most is the first: background television is the only one nobody chose to turn on. It is also the easiest to turn off, because nobody is watching it.
The screen that reads
Part of screen time is reading.
Subtitles on a video, the group chat, the wiki page about the game, the article about the team — that is all text somebody is decoding, at speed, by choice, for a reason they care about. The same thing applies as with graphic novels, which count as reading.
Which is worth saying out loud. The household count of “time reading” almost never includes any of it, and the household count of “time on screens” almost always does. The same twenty minutes get filed under the wrong column twice.
There is a practical consequence. A child who reads three thousand words of game wiki on a Saturday has done something the reading log will never show, and something that behaves, for vocabulary purposes, a good deal more like a book than like a cartoon.
What to change first, if anything
No stopwatch and no general negotiation. One concrete thing:
- Turn off the background one. The television nobody is watching is the cheapest change and the least argued about.
- Change one slot before touching the whole day. Half an hour — before dinner, say — with the whole house off screens. The adults’ ones included.
- Prefer what ends by itself. A round with an end, an 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 the same distance from a hand. If it takes getting up to find it, it loses.
- Offer the format that competes on equal terms. An audiobook in the car, or a comic on the table: what each format does and what evidence it has.
And a note on time, which is the resource underneath all of it: how much reading time is actually enough has its own piece, with the table from the study that produced the famous figure — here.
About the guilt
Somebody 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 result of that competition says little about a household. The finding above backs that up: across 480,000 participants, total screen time tracked no relationship with school performance.
What is within reach is smaller and more specific: one slot, one screen, and the book closer to a hand than the remote is.
Where to start
This week, turn off the background television and leave a book on the table where the remote usually sits. Nothing else. If somebody opens it by the third afternoon, you have your answer.
And if the screen turns out to be the excuse and the cause sits elsewhere, there are nine more reasons in the ten. They run 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
Deja un comentario