Published in Svenska Dagbladet, 2024-09-04. Translated from Swedish.

Opinion.

The screen is today the route to community, news, schoolwork and culture. Rather than restricting access to the phone, we should ask ourselves what is actually happening on it.

At Ohio State University in the spring of 1947, a panel convened to discuss the great media question of the day. Parents were worried and experts were called in. Is radio really good for our children? The panel debated whether some programmes were harmful, while others felt it was the sheer volume of radio listening that most affected children and family life. A telling quote about the panel in the Muncie Evening Press describes how “instead of sharing the experiences of the day, everyone escapes from each other. Radio makes thinking, good conversation and concentration almost impossible.”

I think about this after reading the 94-page knowledge compilation produced by Sweden’s Public Health Agency and the Media Authority. The report addresses the link between digital media and young people’s health, and forms the basis for the screen-time recommendations recently released.

The assumption that there is a connection between screens and young people’s health is taken for granted before the work has even begun. The many pages then attempt to substantiate that thesis as best they can, using scientific research and various other studies. It does not go particularly well. There is very little research suggesting that the link is as strong as many parents may feel it to be. It is also difficult to make confident statements about recommendations for people aged 0 to 25 — the age range the report covers. Restrictions on screen time for children under two are less controversial than for older teenagers.

The subject is familiar to me. Beyond being a parent myself, I founded and was CEO of one of the world’s largest children’s games companies, Swedish Toca Boca. For eight years I worked in Sweden and the United States on everything from legislation and privacy protection to product development and communications. I have spent countless hours discussing screen time with researchers, teachers and parents — including the person behind the American screen-time recommendations from the AAP, the American Academy of Pediatrics. They have had theirs for 25 years. In Sweden we got ours only now.

As the radio example shows, parental anxiety about children is nothing new. In the late 1800s parents worried that young women could not distinguish reality from fiction — because they read too many novels, as depicted by Gustave Flaubert in Madame Bovary, whose book-addicted heroine is drawn into a corrupting fantasy world. The video violence debate of the 1980s was not entirely different. The fact that anxiety repeats itself is no reason to dismiss it. But it can help us contextualise it — and by looking back we can also see how those earlier concerns played out. An overconsumption of fiction and radio did not become a major social problem, after all.

When the Public Health Agency looks for problems with screen time, this perspective seems to have been lost. The report cites cross-sectional studies, described in the report as giving “a picture of how factors are related to each other, even if it is not possible to determine whether there are causal relationships.” Particularly clear causal relationships are not to be found — neither in the material nor in the world at large.

At the press conference where the recommendations were presented, the social affairs minister said that “we cannot simply stand by and watch as young people feel worse and screens tighten their grip on their lives.” The concern for young people’s wellbeing is something many can share — but why presuppose the cause? Statistics Sweden data shows that anxiety, worry or angst among 16–24-year-olds has increased. But that increase started in 1994. Instagram launched in 2010 and TikTok in 2016. Screens may well be a contributing factor, but singling them out as the cause of young people’s mental health is a one-eyed analysis.

What about sedentary behaviour? Parents have always felt that children should be “outside playing” rather than whatever it is they want to do instead. Looking at the Public Health Agency’s own data: the proportion of children aged 11 to 15 who exercise at least four times a week has increased — nearly tripled in some cases — between 1985 and 2021. The share who are physically active for an hour has been stable for 20 years. Certainly there are likely groups of young people for whom activities have decreased in favour of screen-based alternatives. But the breadth of the problem does not appear as widespread as many parents experience it to be.

One of the recommendations is to limit teenagers’ screen time to a maximum of three hours a day. Parents who try to implement this restriction will have a hard time. The screen for a teenager — as for an adult — is the gateway to communication, community, news, schoolwork, music, literature and film. Everything happens on the same screen. Restricting at that level becomes faintly parodical — a swing at thin air that is unlikely to help either the conversations between young people and adults, or the wellbeing of either party.

One concept mentioned in the report is displacement effects: what happens when something crowds out other things important to wellbeing — food, sleep or social relationships, for example. Here there is a recommendation worth listening to: do not let any single thing crowd out everything else. But to do that, we need to look one level deeper than the screen itself. What is actually happening on it? Is it games providing constant, immediate feedback? It may be worth reducing those to maintain the patience needed for other things. If, on the other hand, it is a group chat providing support and care, that may be worth keeping.