For years, parents have been told a one-sentence cautionary tale about childhood and screens: the less, the better. Whether it’s a portable device, a game console, social media, or streaming services, screen time has continually been framed as an escapable harm to young people. The more hours they logged in front of a screen, the worse was understood to be happening to them.
But new work is complicating that simplistic story. One of the largest published studies in JAMA Network Open in August 2026 shows that association between screen use and a child’s socio-emotional, behavioural and developmental functioning might be much more complex than counting hours on a device.
A Scottish birth cohort of 3,786 children was tracked from childhood to adolescence, and there was little indication that typical increases in screen time had a consistent, long-term negative developmental impact.
The findings don’t mean excessive screen time is acceptable but a different question should be asked: are we concentrating too much on children amount of screen time and not enough on how they use it, why they use it and what’s happening in the rest of their lives? They focused on consumption of screen media by home age 5, 10 and 15 through television, movies and video, electronic gaming and at 15 through social media and messaging.
The team also considered family functioning and other factors that may impact child’s development.
That last point is key. Family characteristics, housing environment and media utilisation may influence a child’s wellbeing. When family functioning was controlled for, there was no association between screen time and no developmental problems at age 5 or 10.
At age 15 difficulties were linked with very high levels of electronic gaming consumption exclusively. In addition, being a high user of screens (using a screen for 2 hours or more on the number of days), was connected to being a bit more difficult at age 10, but this association did not hold at age 15. So early patterns may be important without inevitably predicting a child’s ultimate future.
Another unexpected result related to social media and messaging. In some studies, the use of messaging and social media more than an hour a day was tied to lower probability of above median difficulties score. Though, the investigators emphasized that the finding should be interpreted with caution and does not imply that social media use causes better mental health.
It could be that teenagers with more intact social functioning are more inclined to surf the web or have a text-based conversation. But, the result would ground the belief that each type of screen time is equally harmful. This is the point where the debate about time spent in front of the screen starts to seem more like a human one.
There is a world of difference between a 13 year old who spends an evening on a video chat for two hours talking to friends, and a 13 year old who uses his or her 10 year night alone to access ‘graphic’ internet links. And a 10 year old playing a learning game with a parent or sibling is not experiencing the ‘Web’ in the same way as a four year old dumping all her Playmobile and playing on a computer for several hours.