Screen Time and (Belgian) Teenagers

Parental anxiety about young people's use of media has increased with the advent of Generation Alpha. Excessive consumption is assumed to lead to a sedentary lifestyle, psychiatric disorders, overconsumption of sexual content and suicidal behaviour. But are these assumptions valid?

We supplemented data from the 2014 Health Behaviour in School-aged Children Study for Belgium with a bibliographical search of online databases (Medline, Scopus, PsycArticles, PsycInfo, PubMed) with the keywords 'adolescent' - 'internet' and 'sedentarity' or 'suicide' or 'family' or 'sex*' or 'porno*' for articles published between 2014 and 2019. We selected 27 original research articles and/ or quantitative or qualitative meta-analyses.

Total consumption of different media (television, video games, internet) remained stable until 2010, and significantly increased in 2014. No parallel increase in sedentarity was reported. Controversy continues to surround the quantification of overconsumption, and the definition of 'problematic use'. Nevertheless, it appears that 5% of young people have unusual internet use, and 97.5% of these meet the criteria for a mental disorder. The risk of overconsumption is related to four factors: familial, personality, peer influence and supply. These general factors are supplemented by specific factors related to the abuse of sexual content and suicidal behaviour. For the latter, specific risk factors are the same as for suicidal young people who are not influenced by social media.

Even if screen time is higher for Generation Alpha, these young people are no more at risk unless they accumulate risk factors. They are also exposed to challenges that researchers have not yet studied in any depth. One question relates to how they can manage their privacy if their parents published, without their consent, photographs of them as children? Another issue is their relationship to knowledge, given that everything they need to know can easily be found online.