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Right Start Blog
iGen and Smartphones: Part II
Read part two in Mr. Mufson's dissection of Jean Twenge's Atlantic article on unhappiness as it relates to smartphones.
Last week I wrote about Jean Twenge’s article in The Atlantic entitled “Have Smartphones Destroyed A Generation?” that cited research concluding that the more time teenagers spend using their electronic devices, the less likely they are to report high levels of happiness. She further noted that teens who frequently use social media apps (like Instagram — on which many adolescents post their frequent, enticing, and perfectly curated social activities) report higher levels of loneliness, anxiety, depression, and isolation. Twenge’s article is a sobering and important read.
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Another unintended consequence of the ubiquity of smartphones is that typical teens now report sleeping fewer than seven hours most nights. As Twenge writes, “Sleep experts say that teens should get about nine hours of sleep a night; a teen who is getting less than seven hours a night is significantly sleep deprived.” Yet “57% more teens were sleep deprived in 2015 than in 1991…[and] in just the 4 years from 2012 to 2015, 22% more teens failed to get seven hours of sleep. The increase is suspiciously timed,…starting around when most teens got a smartphone.”
Of course sleep deprivation is tied to many health, learning, and emotional issues: irritability; mood disorders; depression; anxiety; impaired thinking, reasoning, and reaction time; weight gain; and high blood pressure. Interestingly enough, kids who read books and magazines, even past their bedtimes, have been shown to have more and better quality sleep than their peers who find “the allure of the smartphone is often too much to resist.”
The timing of one’s screen use also seems to impact the quality and duration of sleep. As Twenge notes, “Children who use a media device right before bed are more likely to sleep less than they should, are more likely to sleep poorly, and are more than twice as likely to be sleepy during the day.” Although causation is difficult to establish, “smartphones could be causing lack of sleep, which leads to depression, or the phones could be causing depression, which leads to a lack of sleep… but the smartphone’s blue light glowing in the dark is likely playing a nefarious role.”
What are some solutions to the negative impacts significant smartphone use seems to cause? Here are some that come to mind:
What are some solutions to the negative impacts significant smartphone use seems to cause? Here are some that come to mind:
- Moderation.
- Limits.
- Screen-free periods of an hour or so before bedtime.
- Insisting that kids be involved in a variety of activities, including outlets that give them plenty of exercise and get them outdoors.
- Making certain that kids have ample opportunity for face-to-face, in-person communication.
- Practice interpreting facial expression, tone of voice, and body language.
- Not allowing devices in bedrooms overnight.
- Whole family screen-free periods.
- Kitchen, mudroom, or laundry room charging stations into which all of a household’s devices must be plugged after a certain hour.
Twenge’s article clearly articulates what is at stake when we are not mindful and deliberate about smartphone use by teenagers (and probably by adults, too). She asserts, “What’s at stake isn’t just how kids experience adolescence. The constant presence of smartphones is likely to affect them well into adulthood. Among people who suffer an episode of depression, at least half become depressed again later in life. Adolescence is a key time for developing social skills… In the next decade, we may see more adults who know just the right emoji for a situation, but not the right facial expression.”
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