Screen Damage: The Dangers of Digital Media for Children

All forms of recreational digital consumption--whether on smartphones, tablets, game consoles, or TVs--have skyrocketed in the younger generations. From the age of two, children in the West clock up more than 2.5 hours of screen time a day; by the time they reach thirteen, it's more than seven hours a day. Added up over the first eighteen years of life, this is the equivalent of almost thirty school years, or fifteen years of full-time employment.

Most media experts do not seem overly concerned about this situation: children are adaptable, they say, they are "digital natives," their brains have changed and screens make them smarter. But other specialists--including some pediatricians, psychiatrists, teachers, and speech therapists--dispute these claims, and many parents worry about the long-term consequences of their children's intensive exposure to screens.

Michel Desmurget, a leading neuroscientist, has carefully weighed up the scientific evidence concerning the impact of the digital activities of our children and adolescents, and his assessment does not make for happy listening: he shows that these activities have significant detrimental consequences in terms of the health, behavior, and intellectual abilities of young people, and strongly affect their academic outcomes.