“Children’s addiction to screens is very rare”

Children can no longer do without screens! If the French devote, on average, nearly 5 hours a day to them, the youngest are not spared by the phenomenon: from the age of 2 to 5, toddlers are glued to them for more than an hour and adolescents up to 6.5 hours.

All addicts? Let’s see, but, victims of their success, screens have become the designated culprits for all the ills of youth! To the point that the President of the Republic himself took up the subject.

“If we talk about the perverse effects of screens it is because they have positive effects alongside”

During his press conference on January 16, he announced the establishment of a commission responsible for evaluating the impact of their use by children. Professor Amine Benyamina, psychiatrist and addictologist and co-president of this commission, guest of the show “Health in Questions”takes stock of this issue.

Are screens really harmful to children?

“No !“, responds spontaneously Amine Benyamina who emphasizes that “if we talk about the perverse effects of screens, it’s because they have positive effects alongside”. According to the professor, digital technology and its supports – “a fantastic technological advancement”– facilitate access to culture, promote certain social links and have practical virtues which make it, according to him, “almost impossible to do without it today”.

What do we really know about their negative effects on children’s mental health?

“Contradictory publications exist on this subject”warns Professor Benyamina who explains this by the fact that “the measurement to reach conclusions is difficult to define”. “How to set up a research protocol?”, he asks himself. An absence of objective judgment criteria which also confirms a general review bringing together more than 2,400 studies involving a total of nearly 2 million participants and whose results are described as “mixed”work published in September 2023 in the journal Nature Human Behavior.

“Screens can cause damage but not a real pathology”

Concerning the often mentioned risk of social phobia born from excessive use of screens, Professor Benyamina wonders “where is the chicken and where is the egg?” specifying that if screens can contribute to desocialization, this cannot be qualified as a phobia. “The pathologization of screen use is rare, they can cause damage but not a real pathology”he insists.

Do screens incite violence?

Could screens incite violence? “It’s a very debated element, we don’t really know”recognizes Amine Benyamina who recalls that if “showing violence can be considered as a model presented to younger people, we must also talk about the phenomenon of mithridatization through which seeing violence reduces the use of this form of expression”.

Are screens responsible for poor academic scores?

More evidence, however, exists on the negative effects of excessive screen use on academic performance.

“We must not shout haro on the screens”

“There is definitely an impact on cognition and academic scores,” underlines Professor Benyamina, citing the example of China where a drastic limitation on the use of screens is imposed on young people, and where academic scores are exceptional, and by evoking his recent meeting with a Swedish minister, a country in which schools have returned to “all paper” after a phase of “all digital”. “But in this area, we must not shout haro on the screens, we must think about how to organize their proper use”he tempers.

Can we really talk about screen addiction in children?

“An addiction is the loss of all freedom to abstain, this is not the case for the majority of young people facing screens”, explains Professor Amine Benyamina for whom “addiction is very rare even if there is harm generated by the use of screens”.

Why a commission working on the dangers of screens only for children?

“Giving children priority when thinking about the proper use of screens is responding to a complaint from society which believes that at a time when screens are everywhere, it is necessary for the youngest to provide “order, because what is lost in childhood will never be acquired”underlines Amine Benyamina.

“Authoritarian measures would be inapplicable in France”

But he recognizes that he is “impossible not to think about what parents do, what role models do they represent for their children?”

What measures could the commission propose?

Professor Amine Benyamina, immediately dismisses “authoritarian measures which would be inapplicable in France” remembering that “everything forbidden leads to a desire to transgress”. But it is necessary “respond to an expectation, restore order and seek the benefit-risk balance”he adds.

“The socio-professional category has an impact on screen consumption”

He hopes that the work of the commission will result in “easy and applicable recommendations for parents, screens already being an object of conflict in families”.

Remembering that “the socio-professional category has an impact on screen consumption and that higher categories integrate the recommendations more easily”Amine Benyamina emphasizes that it “We will have to be inventive so that the messages are received by the less fortunate, we will have to go beyond the information that is already possible to find on this subject”.

And to conclude, he delivers a personal reflection about digital technology on screens, “a fantastic tool which has changed lives but whose use by children deserves to be reasoned” but which prompts him to recall… “the importance of continuing to talk to each other live!”