Tech Talk: Screentime Part 2

Last week I wrote about screentime & sleep, as a result of my community time session with Grades 9 & 10.  This week I met with Grade 11 to do a similar session.  One immediate difference at this stage was the level of parental controls being significantly lower than in Grade 9 & 10.  I therefore spoke with the students about the fact that parents were clearly deciding that at this age (most are around 16) they can be trusted to make decisions for themselves about their screen use. With that trust, comes a responsibility to think carefully for themselves about their usage.

I asked them to look at their phone screentime, and many of them completed the survey.  Response numbers varied across the questions, but there were always at least 20 students responding to each question, out of a group of 35 who were present (some had other commitments at the time of meeting).  We used two sample days - the previous day, Tuesday, and the previous Saturday.

• 50% of students had their last phone pickup on Tuesday after 11pm at night
• 26% of students had screentime of less than 2 hours on the Tuesday
• 27% of students had screentime of over 6 hours on the Tuesday (with 15% over 8 hours)
• 5% of students had screentime of less than 2 hours on the Saturday
• 42% of students had screentime of over 8 hours on Saturday 

Bearing in mind that this is only speaking about phone screentime, and does not include iPad, personal computers at home, games consoles or Chromebooks, for many of our students, this is a huge amount of time spent on screen.  I asked them to discuss what they felt would be a healthy amount of phone screentime for their age-group, and to reflect on what their screentime is.  The chart here shows the conclusion of that.

We then looked at pickups, and some statistics are shown below:

• 58% of students had between 50 and 100 pickups on the Tuesday
  (23% were less than this; 19% were more than this)
• 30% of students had between 50 and 100 pickups on the Saturday
  (30% were less than this, 39% were more than this)

I pointed out to students that if they have 1 hour before school, and 6 hours after school (4-10pm),  75 pickups (which seemed about average on Tuesday) equates to picking up their phone around once every 5.6 minutes.  Sometimes they will stay on screen for longer than a second, so in reality, in their non-school hours they are barely having time away from their phones.  I hope that following this session they will check their screentime, think about what is healthy, and consider any changes they might want to make to benefit their personal relationships, work focus and mental health.  You might want to have a discussion with your children about this over the weekend!