Teen Screen Time Goes Hand in Hand With Wacky Bedtimes During the Pandemic

CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- Early adolescents not only spent more time on screens since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic -- they also started going to bed later and sleeping less, according to longitudinal data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study.

Among this group, recreational screen time was up during the first year of the pandemic, with 45 minutes more spent on social media and 20 minutes more on video games, compared with the pre-COVID era. Girls in particular gravitated toward increased social media use, whereas boys tended to be the ones spending more time gaming, reported Orsolya Kiss, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher at SRI International in Menlo Park, California.

In turn, greater screen time was associated with later bedtimes during the summer of 2020, when morning wake-up times were delayed before returning to normal upon the return to school in the fall. This resulted in a shorter time in bed in the latter part of 2020 and early 2021, Kiss told the attendees of the annual SLEEP meeting, hosted jointly by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society.

"Adolescents and families have turned to online activities and social platforms more than ever before to maintain well-being, connect with friends and family, and for online schooling," Kiss said in a press release. "However, it is concerning that there was no indication of any spontaneous decline in screen use into 2021 when there were fewer [pandemic] restrictions."

Sufficient sleep is important to adolescents still undergoing cognitive, physical, social, and emotional development. In a study of teenagers ages 14 to 18, one night's sleep deprivation resulted in worse neurobehavioral performance and sleepiness the next day.

"There is an urgent need to increase parental awareness and help families to formulate age-appropriate media use plans," Kiss said. As for public policy, there needs to be greater support for positive health behaviors and more promotion of balanced screen usage in this age group, her group urged.

Session moderator Karen Jakubowski, PhD, a clinical psychologist at the University of Pittsburgh, expressed her curiosity about the potential effect of screen time on mood.

Kiss said that her group did look into mood, and found that screen time and poor sleep were associated with more symptoms of depression, anxiety, and stress. "It was fascinating ... that we did not see any positive association between screen time and positive effects [on mood]," she noted.

This study analyzed survey data from over 5,000 kids ages 11 to 14, roughly split between the sexes, and recruited from 21 sites in 17 states. Participants reported sleep and daily screen time use across six timepoints in 2020 to 2021, including prior to the pandemic.

Investigators previously used these surveys to determine that average daily screen time rose to 7.7 hours from the pre-pandemic estimate of 3.8 hours.

During the SLEEP session, epidemiologist Symielle Gaston, PhD, MPH, a research fellow at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, asked for clarification on whether the present study was able to account for school breaks, both before and during the pandemic, in the adolescent sleep behaviors observed.

Kiss acknowledged the point, but noted the difficulty of this analysis in such a large cohort spanning many students from many schools. Her group couldn't determine whether the teenagers had been on school breaks when they completed the surveys.

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