Takeaways from large-scale childhood study
S1: I'm Andrew Bracken and this is Screen Time , featuring conversations about technology and kids in today's digital age. Like so many other parents , I have real questions about screen time and its impact on my kids long term health and well-being. But to really understand those impacts , large long term research is needed. That's where the ABCd study comes in. It's the Adolescent Brain cognitive development study , and it's the largest long term study on brain development in kids in the United States. Clinical psychologist and professor Susan Tapert is an associate director and principal investigator at the Studies San Diego site. The conversation begins by Professor Tapert explaining more about the ABCd study and how it works.
S2: So in 2016 to 2018 , we recruited about 12,009 to 10 year olds from around the United States , including over 700 here in San Diego and across our 21 sites. We continue to follow these participants through the teenage years and hopefully beyond that , to understand development and factors that are linked to various good and bad things that can happen in in our development.
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S2: And then during the pandemic , where kids were at home a lot and really digging in deeper to digital media use patterns. So we want to make sure we're positioned to be able to answer how this might influence them long term.
S1: So , you know , how are you and other researchers basically getting information about technology use ? Is it surveys ? Is it like actual technology ? How are you getting that information.
S2: Through a number of ways. So first , through asking teens themselves about their use of their device , their iPad tablets , you know , consoles and other things like that. We also asked their parents some questions about their screen media use , as well as problems that they've had , like , do they get angry and irritable if they have to stop using their their phone in certain situations ? We know that self-report of anything can be difficult , especially when it's things we do fairly often , like using our phones. So there's another way that we measure this as well , which is objectively through passive sensing. There's an app that if the participant is allowing us to , then we'll put it on their phone for a couple of weeks. And it doesn't tell us any private information like who they're texting or anything , but it just tells us how much time per day they're spending using various apps so we can see if they are in fact using , say , social media apps for four or more hours a day. If they're spending a lot of their time with their phone using streaming kinds of apps.
S1: And what have you learned so far ? I understand.
S2: We have seen that youth do tend to underreport their screen media use when we ask them versus when we look at their phone , we can see there's kind of a underreporting. Typically , we can see that there's a lot of different patterns of use. So on average , as kids get older , they tend to use their phones a little bit more , but there's a huge wide range of different patterns of screen use that young people are involved with. So , for example , some teens spend a lot of their time with social media kinds of apps like Instagram , TikTok. Some don't use those apps very much , and they're doing a lot of streaming , just kind of more passive watching of things. Some are using it for artistic and educational purposes. Some just don't use it very much at all. So there's really a wide range. And this is going to help us understand the effects of use , because we can put this information together over time , year after year , as we're assessing these kids in relation to their brain imaging data , information about their anxiety and depression , information about their sleep to see what the effects are.
S1: I mean , you kind of let into it there.
S2: And it's kind of a tricky one to answer. There's a lot of speculation , of course , that this is a linkage , but it's hard to know for sure unless we can look over time in the same people and see if , say , like increases in their screen media use results in increases in their depressive symptoms. So there's some great work that's been going on here at UC San Diego , from doctor Natasha Wade and Doctor Tam Wen lui , also at UC San Francisco from Jason Nagata and others as well , who've used ABCd data to try to answer some of these questions. We know that a lot of the relationships are bidirectional. So we have seen in some analyses that if screen use increases , we can see higher levels of Depressive symptoms later and anxious symptoms later. But it goes the other way around as well. So kids who have kind of higher levels of depression and anxiety tend to use their phone more , especially social media types of apps a little bit more. And at an increasing level , we don't know exactly why. Maybe because they're feeling socially isolated. They're not with other people. They're home on their own. Maybe they're turning to it for a source of distraction. But there's a two way set of relationships there.
S1: So just to clarify that , do you have any information on how many hours or what type of screen use , where those factors come into play.
S2: A little bit. So on average , you know , we know that kids who are 15 , 16 years of age are using their phone about , you know , five hours a day , 5.5 hours for females on average. But there's a really wide range there , and we see that young people who have anxiety and depression problems are at the much higher end of that range , and maybe several hours more per day than kids without those kind of symptoms.
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S2: So there's a number of studies out there , survey kinds of studies where they'll ask people a set of questions at one point in time. And often we'll see that two factors are both high at the same time. So for example , a high level of depression and a high amount of of social media usage may both be high at the same time. We might think that the social media use is causing the the mood issues Choose because social media is sort of new ish , but we don't know for sure. It can easily be the other way around. In human studies , it's really hard to do the most definitive kind of research study , which would be to randomly assign different people to different social media usage conditions and then see if that changes their mood. That would be a really hard thing to do , although there are a few people who are trying to do some some things like this. But we can look in a study like ABCd over time to see if naturally occurring increases and decreases in certain behaviors , and symptoms are followed later in time , with changes in the other factor of interest.
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S2: So we have seen social media and in some of the analyses kind of streaming and passively watching things like YouTube videos as being maybe a little more linked to some of the problems than some of the other kinds of apps. But on the other hand , some of the other kind of apps , like if you're looking at things on the internet , if you're using your weather and clock app and things like that , you don't tend to use them for very long. So it's a really different engagement pattern.
S1: So one study I saw that that I think used ABC data focused on parental monitoring , and I think it found greater parental monitoring was associated with less screen time use. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about that research. Yeah.
S2: Yeah. We've seen this come up in a couple of different analyses of ABCd data from a number of different authors , actually. And it looks like if parents are a little bit more involved with the kinds of screen activity that their teens are are using. And also , if they're kind of setting limits and having expectations , that seems to be linked to having less screen use but importantly , less screen problems. So we asked the teens some questions about how do you feel if somebody takes away your phone , you know , are you getting quite irritable and anxious ? Do you feel like there's just nothing to do and quite bored if your phone is taken away ? So those kind of problems tend to be less when the parent is a little bit more involved. We've also seen that there's less cyberbullying when parents are a little bit more involved and aware of their youth's , um , digital media activity.
S1: Another study focused on sleep again. This study covers all sorts of of factors in adolescents lives as you follow them. Right. Can you talk about what you've learned about sleep as it relates to screens. Yeah.
S2: Yeah. There's a number of things that we have found. Tasha Wade here in San Diego took a really careful look at some really detailed patterns of some of our participants phone usage and found that even at ages 13 and 14 , there was a lot of activity in the wee hours of the morning , like at three , four in the morning , especially kind of streaming kind of activities , and then kind of in the late night , like 11:00 at night , kind of a lot of , um , typing of the phone , which might be kind of social media or communication kind of kind of apps. So some of that obviously is going to interfere with sleep quality and quantity , which in turn has effects downstream on attention , your ability to perform well in school and your mood. Yeah.
S1: Yeah. And that 3:00 4:00 hour , I think. What do they call it , the witching hour or whatever. I mean , if you get interrupted sleep like I sometimes do , you do kind of have that space. You're like , what do I do now ? What can I do ? So having that device kind of near you adds a little bit of a challenge , right ? Yeah.
S2: Probably having it at a distance can help all of us. Yeah.
S1: Yeah. So , I mean , with all that , this research is ongoing. There's a lot of data still being collected over the next several years as as this cohort ages and reaches young adulthood.
S2: So I think parents shouldn't feel too bad. It's a common , common challenge for the vast majority of households. And it's a bit of a can be a bit of a constant battle. You know , we don't know from our research yet for sure , but probably avoiding conflict will be somewhat helpful. We do know that families where there's just a lot more conflict. In general. There tends to be more screen use and more stress , so we want to try to avoid conflict. The parents role is important , though , to be kind of aware of what your youth are doing with their phones , having conversations with them. Keeping the lines of communication open and maybe becoming a little bit informed so that you know how some of these apps work and operate.
S1: You can find more resources on all things Kids in Tech at our website , KPBS. Meantime , what questions do you have when it comes to your kids and screens ? My email is Screen Time at KPBS. I'm Andrew Bracken. Thanks for listening.
