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Screen Time for Kids Is Fine! Unless It's Not
Two new books offer radically different approaches to how people should think about smartphones and social media.
In the past year, grassroots organizations like Smartphone Free Childhood have risen to national prominence as parents fret about the damage that screens and social media might be causing to young people’s mental health. In his book, Etchells picks through much of the literature on screen time, including studies from Haidt and his sometime collaborator, psychologist Jean Twenge, whose work on the link between smartphones and mental health in young people has been extremely influential. A few years later Twenge, Haidt, and colleagues ran a different analysis on the same datasets and instead concluded that social media did have a big negative impact on girls in particular—stronger than binge drinking, sexual assault, or hard drug use.
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