Over the last two weeks, I have asked every single one of my students a single question: "What is your daily average screen time?" Their reactions have ranged from horror to bashfulness to immediate defensiveness ("I'll tell you, but I can already say it's not nearly as bad as everyone I know!").
Now that I have received an adequate amount of data from, albeit, a humble sample size in comparison to the greater adolescent population, I am happy and sad to report that amongst 62 students I polled, their average screen time was a whopping 4 hours and 1 minutes per day (I shaved off the seconds, like any data purist would do, of course).
4 hours and 1 minute per day, times 7 days in a week, is over 28 hours per week. That is over a full day out of every week. That is over 4 full days per calendar month, or roughly 48 days per calendar year. Almost 2 whole months of time spent on screens, with the top 3 apps coming in at TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram. Oof.
These are the same students who say they have "no time" to read, or to hang out with their friends, or to add on that extra activity that will get them the "boost" they need for a school like Harvard, Stanford, NYU, or wherever else their heart has settled. The same students who say they can't keep up with the work assigned by school or me, or their SAT or ACT tutors, or their parents, or anyone else in their life. But why was this happening, really?
At first, because of the pandemic, it was hard to identify that these students were being psychologically plagued by their digital addictions. Everyone thought the social exclusion from quarantine and Zoom school were to blame--but these were only supplementary factors in creating the kind of teenage environment we see today. How can students access balance and a healthy mindset when they are spending 6 out of 12 months, every single year, on just 2 activities: sleep and social media? Six months is a modest calculation too; I had many students who reported screen time daily averages of 7 hours per day or higher, with the highest being over 12 hours per day.
Imagine the level of comfort, productivity, and self-satisfaction that would come with 4 hours or more a day being spent on other activities, not even ones that are necessarily "academic." Think about how much better your relationship with your family members could be with even 30 additional minutes per day spent on in-person bonding or deep connections. Or if we instead went on a walk for an hour a day, experiencing nature and seeing with our own eyes the world we hope to heal through our education? Haven't we gotten it all backwards in the modern era? Are we so lost behind our screens that we've normalized the waste of time and human progress on both a micro and macro scale?
There is no other activity that we have come to accept as taking up 4 hours of our day, per day. We do not eat, shower, walk our dogs, refine our knitting skills, or learn new languages for 4 hours a day. Most students don't even do actual, meaningful homework for that long every single day (it seems to them like they are doing more work than they actually are, because they frequently take digital breaks or are interrupted by screens or notifications). We have normalized a behavior that has neurologically and psychologically damaging impacts, and we have fallen so into this rabbit hole and the overwhelming excess of all things that we sometimes no longer recognize who we are anymore.
Do yourself a favor. Moderate your screen time. Be intentional. Don't quit things and fall victim to a cycle of addiction--just be more mindful of how you're engaging with people/resources online, and how much. Technology isn't inherently bad. Used correctly, it can enhance our daily lives and provide world solutions. We just need people with the brains to utilize it that way. Be somebody who can.
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