Screen time and kids: what does the evidence actually say?

I get asked about screen time at every single dinner party. So let's settle this: what does the actual evidence say, not the panic?

The honest answer is: it's complicated and the effect sizes are tiny. The largest studies find correlations between heavy screen use and wellbeing measures, but they're smaller than the effect of wearing glasses or eating potatoes.

Orben and Przybylski's 2019 analysis is still the best work on this. They found that screen time explains less than 0.5% of variance in adolescent wellbeing. The moral panic is wildly disproportionate to the data.

But — and this is important — not all screen time is equal. Passive scrolling, active creation, video calling a grandparent, and playing an educational game are completely different activities with different effects.

The displacement hypothesis is what I worry about most. It's not that screens are toxic. It's that hours on screens displace sleep, exercise, and face-to-face interaction. Those displacements matter.

My advice when people ask: worry less about the number of hours and more about what they're doing, when they're doing it, and what it's replacing. Context matters more than quantity.