During the pandemic, Jan Plass learned firsthand how nuanced the discussion about kids and screen time needs to be. At one point, she got angry at her teenage children for the amount of time they were spending in front of screens.
“I go into their rooms and tell them to stop using the computer. My oldest son says, ‘Dad, I just wrote another song, look,’” says Plass, director of the CREATE Consortium for Research and Evaluation of Advanced Technologies in Education at New York University. “My youngest son was in his room, and when I got ready to get mad at him, he had just looked up how to play a piano piece by a particular pianist in a particular style.”
Plass, who is also co-director of New York University’s Institute for Games for Learning, wrote a blog post about the experience. “I realized that this whole conversation about screen time is completely wrong because it assumes that they are doing a certain type of screen time activity that we don’t approve of, but it doesn’t recognize that kids today are getting their information from screens like we used to get it from other sources. They are making screens the primary source of education.”
This understanding is key to how Plass believes educators and parents should approach the issue of screen time and screen bans.
Not all screens are created equal
Much of the conversation about screen time currently focuses on Mobile phones are banned in schoolsA new book by New York University psychologist Jonathan Haidt, technology/archive/2024/03/teen-childhood-smartphone-use-mental-health-effects/677722/” target=”_blank” data-url=”https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/03/teen-childhood-smartphone-use-mental-health-effects/677722/” referrerpolicy=”no-referrer-when-downgrade” data-hl-processed=”none”>The anxious generation, argues that social media and cell phones are to blame for the rise in mental health problems among teens.
While Plass points out that Many people disagree with Haidt's conclusions.He believes that phones in schools can be a real distraction.
“One thing is clear: we are having more problems in schools. with phones than those schools that simply said, 'No more phones,“Plass says. But that's because kids typically use phones for texting and social media, not because screens themselves are inherently bad.
Not all on-screen activities are created equal
As Plass learned with her own children, what is done in front of the screen matters. She says that when used correctly in schools, non-phone devices can be very effective for education, encouraging creativity and play through activities like gamification. The trick for educators and parents is to differentiate between productive and distracting screen time.
“The best thing parents can do is to steer their kids toward media production rather than media consumption,” Plass says. “Right now at NYU we’re running a program for high school students called ‘Coding for Game Design.’ So game design is what they’re drawn to, and coding, programming and Unity is what they learn.”
Even with school-provided devices, screen-related distractions can occur, but Plass says avoiding them requires good classroom management. She believes more training in technology education is needed to give educators the skills to manage connected classrooms.
Age also matters when it comes to screen time
The debate on screen time also requires different approaches for different age groups and a better understanding of how children use screens in the early stages of their development.
“We are doing a comprehensive study of children from birth to eight years old to try to understand what they are doing in front of screens. Nobody knows,” says Plass. “We know that children spend a lot of time in front of screens. We know that they are starting to do so at an increasingly younger age, but we have very little data on what is actually being done.”
When he had younger children, Plass had limits on phone use. As his kids got older, he replaced the limits with honest conversations about how much they use the phone and how it affects their relationships and life. He says parents can also model creative uses of screen time by introducing their kids to things like art programs and technological tools for music creation.
“The creative uses of this technology are truly endless,” he says.
