Why the very idea of ‘screen time’ is muddled and misguided

The idea of “screen time” causes arguments

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– but not just between children and their anxious parents. The Children’s Commissioner for England, Anne Longfield, recently compared overuse of social media to junk food and urged parents to regulate screen time using her “Digital 5 A Day” campaign.

This prompted the former director of Britain’s electronic surveillance agency, GCHQ, to respond by telling parents to increase screen time for children so they can gain skills to “save the country”, since the UK is “desperately” short of engineers and computer scientists.

Meanwhile, parents are left in the middle, trying to make sense of it all.

But the term “screen time” is problematic to begin with. A screen can refer to an iPad used to Skype their grandparents, a Kindle for reading poetry, a television for playing video games, or a desktop computer for their homework. Most screens are now multifunctional, so unless we specify the content, context and connections involved in particular screen time activities, any discussion will be muddled.

https://theconversation.com/why-the-very-idea-of-screen-time-is-muddled-and-misguided-82347