For the sake of our children, guidelines are needed for education screen time in schools.
OPINION
A New Zealand Medical Journal (NZMJ) editorial published this week calls for limits to be put on screen time in New Zealand schools.
The text comes after a group of experts found that excessive use of digital technologies was linked to poor physical and mental health in young people.
The findings are particularly worrying for New Zealand, a country where children have some of the highest rates of screen use in the developed world. These rates are found to be partly due to the early adoption and the widespread use of digital devices in classes.
“What we found was that some use of digital technologies can actually support health for children, particularly for teenagers,” said Julie Cullen, a paediatric physiotherapist and co-author of the editorial. “So for example, they can look up health information, they can play some active fitness games or make connections.
“But we found that frequent and extended use of technologies is associated with the risk of harm across numerous areas of children’s health.”
While experts found it was difficult to define what exactly constitutes “excessive” screen time, the review found that most of the identified harms were linked to daily screen use of two to six hours a day.
In New Zealand, a young person can exceed that limit on educational screen time alone.
Excessive screen time was associated with poorer eye health, hearing loss from headphones, repetitive strain injuries and headaches. When it comes to these consequences, what is being watched does not matter, and Cullen pointed out the risks exist whether the child is doing homework or watching TikTok.
When it came to mental health, on the other hand, the most important factors were the quality of what was being observed, the age of the user, and whether they were watching it alone or with others.
Technology was an invaluable tool for continued education during the Covid-19 lockdowns, when we needed to temporarily embrace distance learning, but those are not the times we are in anymore and, while computers and tablets can be assets in a classroom, it is important their use is monitored, so we can protect our children from some of those risks.
The are two main issues with the conversations that, as a society, we have been having around screen time for children. Firstly, these conversations often lack nuance, categorising screens as either good or evil when, in reality, and as the experts point out, not all screen time has the same level of impact.
Secondly, to date, conversations around children’s use of screens has put the responsibility almost entirely, if not entirely, on parents, disregarding the fact parents cannot control how many hours their children are spending on devices at school.
The study highlights the fact screen time at school should also be taken into account and the responsibility cannot lie solely with parents.
Current guidelines for recreational screen time provided by the Ministry of Health state the amount of screen time should be zero for under 2-year-olds, less than an hour a day for children aged 2 to 5, and less than two hours a day for 5 to 17-year-olds.
There is currently no national guidance on technology use within classes.
Mt Eden Normal principal Alan Jackson also says there is a relatively low level of awareness of associated health and safety concerns. It was generally perceived as a problem linked to recreational use of screens, he said. Jackson said many schools had “gone down the rabbit hole” with technology and integrated digital learning into reading, writing, maths and other areas of learning without fully considering the consequences.
As a society, we need to have balanced, nuanced conversations around screen time, anchored on the reality of how our children live, and factoring screen time in and out of school. We also need the Ministry of Education to take a proactive approach on this matter and issue expert-based guidelines on educational screen time in schools.