Young teen phone use doesn’t damage mental health

The time adolescents spend on their phones isn’t that bad for their mental health, according to a new study.

The study tracked young adolescents on their smartphones to test whether more time using digital technology was linked to worse mental health outcomes. The researchers found little evidence of longitudinal or daily linkages between digital technology use and adolescent mental health.

“It may be time for adults to stop arguing over whether smartphones and social media are good or bad for teens’ mental health…”

“It may be time for adults to stop arguing over whether smartphones and social media are good or bad for teens’ mental health and start figuring out ways to best support them in both their offline and online lives,” says Candice Odgers, professor of psychological science at the University of California, Irvine.

“Contrary to the common belief that smartphones and social media are damaging adolescents’ mental health, we don’t see much support for the idea that time spent on phones and online is associated with increased risk for mental health problems,” says Michaeline Jensen, assistant professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

The study surveyed more than 2,000 youth and then intensively tracked a subsample of nearly 400 teens on their smartphones multiple times a day for two weeks. Adolescents in the study were between 10 and 15 years old and represented the economically and racially diverse population of youth attending North Carolina public schools.

The researchers collected reports of mental health symptoms from the adolescents three times a day and they also reported on their daily technology usage each night. They asked whether youth who engaged more with digital technologies were more likely to experience later mental health symptoms and whether days that adolescents spent more time using digital technology for a wide range of purposes were also days when mental health problems were more common. In both cases, increased digital technology use was not related to worse mental health.

When researchers did observe associations, they were small and in the opposite direction that would be expected given all of the recent concerns about digital technology damaging adolescents’ mental health. For instance, teens who reported sending more text messages over the study period actually reported feeling better (less depressed) than teens who were less frequent texters.

Additional researchers from Purdue University and Penn State contributed to the work. The research appears in the journal Clinical Psychological Science.

Source: UC Irvine

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