Imagine you’re a parent. Living with a partner and having a child you love. Now, you love them too much, so you may let them stay on a screen for hours on end. You don’t expect anything, it’s just a kid with YouTube and games. Everyone nowaday does it. It won’t hurt them right? 

That’s where you’re wrong.

After more of this uncontrolled schedule, your child is nothing like it used to be. Now, they’re addicted to their device. Suddenly their attention, grades and behavior in school spiral uncontrollably like you’ve never seen before. They have trouble making friends let alone developing like others. Your kid can’t maintain a healthy weight, doesn’t want to go outside, just screens and screens all day long whether it’s when eating dinner, before school, after school only screens.

Now, you slowly realize how uncontrolled screen time can affect children and their lives, and you regret not knowing this from the start.

This sparks an essential question that you may ask yourself: How does screen time affect children? Well this article is here to show you how screen time negatively affects children by stopping children and youth from properly developing and growing and it negatively impacts their lives. Screen is taking over children’s lives. Nonstop children across the world are staring into screens, not knowing the serious consequences that these actions may result in. 

According to an investigative survey that I sent out to students in my school, 18 out of 32 students spend 4-8 hours of their day on screens, not including the others which vary. 

These students also suffer from different issues that they wrote, this includes pain in different areas of their body, being tired, bad habits, lack of sleep, laziness, being antisocial, shorter attention span and much more. This essentially could conclude that students are negatively affected by screen time. They use it a lot and keep using it for entertainment. 

But is it worth it? 

No, these students do worse in school because of it. That’s not even close to the other results, like the health problems, disorders and delayed development. 

Lack of sleep could affect their development and growth, let alone attention span and focus for the next day. Imagine doom scrolling through a social media feed at 1am. As a result, you end up losing track of time and you go to sleep really late. Not only would you be extremely tired and unproductive in school, but you can even get bad grades and this could possibly affect your future life and health.

There are tons of different aspects and opinions about screen time. Everything has its positives and negatives. But screen time is a controversial topic, and I’m here to tell you how it impacts not only children and youth but also everyone. 

Overall, screen time is generally not good for you. You see, looking at screens from such a young age will interest kids. Interest them a little too much which may lead to addiction. During addiction, kids don’t want to participate in many activities other than looking into their device.

Addiction itself doubles the danger of all of the problems in this article, technically because it makes these effects more prone to children. Now addiction among children is different, as an article from NickLauChildrens shows “While adult brains are more developed and able to exercise impulse control, children’s brains are susceptible to significant changes in structure and connectivity which can stunt normal brain development, lead to screen addiction, and contribute to myriad other consequences.” This tells us that addiction among children may alter brain development, which if it isn’t bad itself it may also lead to other negative aspects which include those recovered in this article and more. 

Now addiction can lead to procrastination, which if you didn’t know is leaving something for later or not doing something, basically laziness. A quote from an interview from a student here at iSchool by the name of Skyler Tauber is “ I guess a bad habit is like sometimes you just scroll for real, like just looking at a screen for too long and you lose track of time, you get distracted from doing stuff that you actually have to do.” This once again proves my point of procrastination being a bad habit and a result of screen time. As stated, kids can brush stuff off and leave it for later because they just want to “scroll” through internet media.  This can lead to bad lifelong habits and missing assignments and doing significant and important things.

These overall habits like addiction and negative effects from screen time can lead to doing worse in school. One quote from an interview I had with a teacher by the name of Mrs Mangano that teaches in high school is “Now, as you get older, it’s just not healthy to be watching a screen for six to seven hours a day. and it also could definitely impact attention span. efore we had our cell phone policy, some students just couldn’t take a break from their phones..it was very concerning.” This tells us that an experienced teacher who spends her days with youth knows that the children have gotten side effects. She told us that it ruins attention span, which can most definitely be realized when you are teaching students. 

As you might already know, bad grades are bad for your education and bad for your future. Now a simple quote from the MayoClinic that proves me right is “Elementary students who have TVs or other screens in their bedrooms tend to perform worse on tests than do those who don’t have these in their bedrooms.” This shows that kids who have more easy access to screens, do less well in school. This results in screen time being bad for children’s education due to them losing significant amounts of their school performance.

Freshman Owen Wolkowitz stated, “If you’re like in school and you are staring at your phone for hours, it might be harder to focus, like a tension deficit.” This proves that screens affect school performance because as a student stated, after looking into screens, it may be harder to focus in school without getting distracted, which means you won’t have such good performance and focus as you would without screens.

 This basically tells us that children would rather watch or play online games rather than do important and valuable schoolwork like learning, and this results in them doing worse in school. Screen time drags children away from open valuable activities and hobbies that are good for them. This can worsen their health and well-being.

 Now going into the health part, screen time can literally delay a child’s overall development and growth. Not only this, but it can result in health problems, such as obesity, sleep deprivation, and more. 

Essentially as you may infer, screen time provided children with tons of negative effects. Now let’s go into depth upon some more.  

Screen time can also affect vision after a certain limit is broken. So screen time essentially affects multiple areas of your eyes and limits their capability and results in your vision declining overtime along with other effects. One quote from CHOP tells us that screen time among children results in “eye fatigue, dry and irritated eyes, loss of focus flexibility, nearsightedness then this can lead to bad sleep and the blue light can disturb vision overall and brain waves.” This shows us the aftermath of screen time on your vision. It can cause discomfort, pain and even permanent problems like worse eyesight. 

When children stay inside, and stare and concentrate into blue light for hours on end, they are straining their eyes, resulting in them becoming tired ending in temporary problems such as pain, discomfort, etc. However, when these processes are incorporated into their day to day activities, the problems worsen, therefore, going from silly little problems to issues that can affect your sight for the rest of your life. 

An interview with a teenager by the name of Milena Maczuga resulted in her stating. “And sometimes when I stare into a screen for too long my eyes start to water a bit and hurt.” This also proves my point and shows that staring into a screen can hurt your eyes temporarily making them water and ache, however this may lead to life long effects and worsened eyesight later on.

Apart from this, while kids are inside once again using their devices, they miss out on daylight which according to Doctor Malik from CHOP is “critical for developing eyes.” Which can end in children having undeveloped and bad eyes.

This is a worldwide trend. Kids all over the world are getting more and more infected by this device plague. Kids are getting more and more addicted, addicted and affected. 

Worldwide, aging from 2-19 kids obesity rate increased by almost 5 percent according to an article by the name of BallardBreif, child obesity rates doubled and tripled over the past couple of decades. Do you know what else tripled over that time? The amount of technology in the world. See a pattern? Essentially, too much screen time in children can result in laziness and other unhealthy habits like an unhealthy diet and too much of it. We know laziness is a real problem which can result in obesity.

An iSchool student named Mo stated that as a result of screen time children are “being lazier basically, and like to have a lack of wanting to do things.” We can see a student admits to laziness spreading among youth nowaday. This laziness is not only bad for a child’s personality but also can be a risk of obesity and even other side effects mentioned in this article.

 A quote from ValleyWiseHealth tells us “Too much time engaging in a sedentary activity, such as playing video games or watching TV, can be a risk factor for obesity. Heart health is also impacted and can lead to a higher risk of diabetes, increased blood pressure or cholesterol.” This shows that screen time leads to sitting for long periods of time and a higher unhealthy diet. This leads to a higher risk for obesity which essentially increases risk for increased risk of health problems like diabetes, higher blood pressure and more.

So we conclude that screen time results in worse health and higher risk of health problems which can horribly affect people and may leave them miserable or even in some scenarios may be fatal and even lead to death. This furthermore leads to obesity and even other diseases and health risks. 

One quote that shows this from SolutionHealth is “Some of the physical problems with screen time include dry eyes, headaches, obesity, and sleep disturbance.” Now this quote only lists the common mishaps, and doesn’t go in depth to them. But this sort of gives us a gist and states the multiple negative health side effects that we gain from screens, and children are the most prone to it. 

Now this transitions us to the other side effects such as sleep disturbance. Screen time, especially in children, extremely disturbs sleep.

An interview with a mother by the name of Anna Maczuga ended with her saying, “When kids have access to blue light and screens before bed, they don’t get good sleep most of the time.” This shows that an experienced mother concluded that screens lead to their children getting bad sleep. We can infer that this isn’t only a problem with her child, rather screens do this to children all over the world, which is critical for their health.

Another thing to keep in mind is that if you get too much sleep disturbance, it can even eventually lead to insomnia, which if you didn’t know is a sleep disorder which makes it hard for you to fall asleep and can provide you with multiple other aspects like higher risk of depression, fatigue, tension, poor concentration and much more. 

HopkinsMedicine shows us this by stating, “The result is a vicious cycle of a 3 a.m. bedtime, waking up sleep deprived, too many caffeinated drinks, followed by more blue light therapy. The consequences go far beyond dozing in class. “Chronic sleep deprivation, which for teenagers means less than 8 or 9 hours of sleep, is a major cause of hyperactivity, poor school performance, depression, anxiety and outbursts of anger,” explains Dr. De Silva, board-certified in sleep medicine, internal medicine, pulmonology and critical care. “Lack of sleep is also a major factor in obesity, high blood pressure and other health risks.” What this means is that our current youth, with the amount of easy accessibility to screen time are not only affecting their sleep but also their way of life. 

Here it says teens go to sleep really late due to the blue light which if you didn’t know comes from screens. This of course ruins their day at school, resulting in laziness, higher risks of disorders like depression and anxiety which may lead to outbursts of anger and mood spikes, obesity and health risks and as i’ve mentioned before poor school performance. Less sleep, especially when in a growing age as a teen, is critical for growth in all aspects of life and health. 

Now, another risk is how screen time affects your skeletal frame. As you might already know or infer, looking down at your device can lead to bad posture. This posture can soon result in what we call tech neck. This so-called tech neck can end up with permanent damage and pain which would have to be medically and or surgically fixed.

 One quote from HopkinsMedicine that shows this is “Many kids and teens have study habits of sitting on the bed or floor working on tablets or laptops for hours at a time. This position results in a hunched posture with no support for the back and causes the child to hold the neck flexed while looking down at the study materials. These are habits that are hard to break. We know that over a long period of time this may result in neck arthritis that sometimes requires surgical intervention.” As you may see, overused screen time can literally ruin your back and lead to long term problems. Take a look at a child on its tablet, or someone walking down the street with their phone. Everyone is looking straight down, crucially affecting their posture. 

This posture can then cause pain and critical damage to your neck and spine, especially at a young age. Habits developed from a young age tend to be passed down. But currently it’s an epidemic across the world, tending to become worse. This therefore proves another reason why screen time is negative for not only youth but everyone overall. 

Another reason why it’s bad is because it stunts development and growth. In depth, growing up with screen time will incorporate an unhealthy lifestyle to children and can clear their sort of crucial mindset for life. 

A quote from HealthMatters states, “Excessive screen time may inhibit a child’s ability to observe and experience the typical everyday activities they need to engage with in order to learn about the world, leading to a kind of “tunnel vision,” which can be detrimental to overall development.” This shows us that the screen time alters children’s abilities to understand and learn about the world which they are bound to grow up in one day. This messes with their development that teaches them how life works and important everyday data. This can change the way they grow up and see the world which may end up bad for them.

Screen time can not only deny your mental and technically physical health, but it can also spike your social development down as well. Studies from CHOC state that “For them, more screen time can be associated with higher anxiety, depression symptoms, lower quality of life, lower psychological well-being, lower school functioning, lower academic achievement, lower self-esteem, poor language achievement, and poor math achievement.” This shows that screen time may result in  different bad disorders such as depression which may result in a bad social life or just may somewhat negatively impact your social emotional state and development. This may also lower your self esteem and make you think bad of yourself and this can result in a worse emotional life.

These impacts could insanely change your future as these influences may result in lower education achievements and school functioning which may affect your future job, studies or overall basic knowledge.

 I interviewed multiple students, children, parents, adults and even teachers. The results incorporated from those interviews resulted in a common outcome that there are negative effects of screens and positive effects. Some positive effects include school screen time, which can help educate children. But screen time ast school is limited, and I’m not trying to convince you to stop using screen time. Just to limit it.

This is an extremely important topic that is not gaining enough attention around the world, resulting in it getting worse. In almost every country, people are getting more and more addicted to technology and rely on it so much that their lives depend on it. People don’t know how horrible this can end up for them. Especially our youth and children. You, your loved ones, friends and people around you can and will be negatively affected by this growing problem if people don’t try to put a stop to this.

 I sent out a google form to several students in my school, from grades 9-12, and I received the following data: 78.2% of students spend at least 4-12 hours a day on screen time, the most claimed to spend around 4-6 hours a day, and others evenly split out between 6-8 and 8-12 hours. The students also claimed that people they know spend mostly 6-12 hours a day, mostly 8-12. The students also responded with some negative effects after excessive screen time use, which consisted of the following: neck pain, anti-socialness, doom scrolling, procrastination, tiredness, bad sleep, going to sleep late, doing bad in school, bad attention span, lack of productive hobbies, constantly checking phone, addictions, moodiness, frustration without device, less productive, anxiousness, eye pain, vision decline, not knowing simple knowledge, laziness and much more. Much proving my points of how bad.

Ways that people can limit these problems is to give your child a bedtime and a good time before screens before they sleep. Make sure your children don’t spend excessive time on technology, don’t be afraid to limit their screen time. Make sure your children incorporate a healthy lifestyle, meaning lots of movement, limited screens and a healthy diet. 

 As stated before, people can also use screen time for good, like in jobs, schools or for their own enjoyment. I am trying to make a point that too much is too bad. Screens have positives and this article isn’t supposed to tell you to cut off use from it forever. It’s just important to maintain time spent on it, just so the impacts reviewed in this article could avoid your life and future which can improve your life a ton.

Look around you, you will see people staring into a screen all around you, everywhere. This small problem is getting out of hand. It’s important that you should manage your screen time and trust me, your life will turn for the good. I hope that this article changed your mind about screen time and allowed you to realize how such a minor thing can change your life drastically.