Our Phones Are Wrecking Us

I’ve always been part of the anti-screen choir for younger kids. And my views on what’s happening with teens and screens – things around social media – are pretty clearly known too. It’s devastating. I’m convinced that social media is the great unhappiness machine, particularly for teens. Screens are the new smoking. The data is coming in highlighting the risks, and parents need to be on the front lines in the relentless push of big tech into our kids’ lives.

But if you’re giving your 1- to 3-year-olds a screen at the moment, please stop.

I’ve got some new Aussie research you’re going to want to know about.

Who they studied:

This was prospective data. This basically means that data was collected as it happened rather than questionnaires asking people to recollect what happened, which is notoriously inaccurate.

The researchers collected information from 220 Aussie family homes every 6 months, when children were 12, 18, 24, 30, and 36 months of age.

What they studied:

Researchers looked at technology usage and then focused on three things:

How many adult words were spoken,
How many child vocalisations were made (because they’re young kids, so not always talking), and
How many conversational turns occurred.

In all, researchers coded more than 7,000 hours of audio to calculate the amount of screen time children were exposed to as opposed to other electronic noises.

What they found:

Increases in screen time were associated with decreases in measures of parent-child talk. The largest decreases were seen at 36 months, when an additional minute of screen time was associated with a reduction of 6.6 adult words, 4.9 child vocalisations, and 1.1 conversational turns.

Extrapolate this across the day, and we’re looking at the average 3-year-old missing out on:

more than 1,100 adult words,
more than 840 vocalisations and
more than 190 conversational turns per day.

Stretch it across a month, and we’re up to the loss of 33,000 words, 25,200 vocalisations, and 5,820 conversational turns. And across a year, the numbers are staggering.

Similar studies have looked at kids who are read to versus those who aren’t, and we’re talking about millions of words per year that the non-reading families’ kids are missing out on.

But back to this study:

“We wanted to understand how much screen time children were exposed to during the early years and whether that interfered with the amount of language these kids heard and spoke in their home,” Dr. Brushe, lead researcher on the study, said. “We know the amount of talk and interaction children experience is critical for their early language development; this study highlights that screen time may be getting in the way of that.”

The study missed anything related to parental mobile phone usage, so this is likely an underestimate.

Technoference is real, and it’s hammering our kids’ development.

Incidentally, a study of Japanese 1-to 3-year-old children published at the end of 2023 showed something similar. Specifically, in this cohort study of 57,980 children, increased television/DVD screen time was negatively associated with developmental scores.

In other words, increased TV/DVD screen times at age 1 and 2 years correlated with lower developmental scores at age 2 and 3 years, respectively.

It’s like a seesaw—when one side goes up, the other comes down. So, if you want your little one to be a chatterbox instead of a screen surfer, it looks like laying the groundwork early might just do the trick.

What does this mean in practice?

At the risk of being blunt and offending, parents have got to stop seeing the screen as a pacifier or babysitter. It’s just not good for the kids. Period.

We’ve got to work extra hard to offset the impact of screens by seeking more opportunities to talk with our kids at every opportunity.

Parents have to put their phones down. These unhappiness machines are killing our connections.

The evidence is there. And it carries right up the age-stack, from our toddlers to our teens and on to all of us grown-ups.