"The use of a longitudinal design in research on screen use in children five, ten and then 15 years of age over ten years, with a focus on total difficulties and prosocial are strengths, as is the inclusion of covariates which produced contrasting findings from studies that were cross-sectional in design. The developmental change in screen use over the years from five to 15 is interesting, especially the role it has regarding social connection in the older years, as is the principal finding that apart from gaming, there are no apparent adverse effects on the two areas of focus apart from that of gaming in the older age group.

Areas for future research include accessing data about what children are actually doing on the screen and who they are doing it with, or whether it is solo.

Also, researching what children are doing when they are not on screens and whether screen time, in a sense, excludes the possibility to engage in other areas, for example, in-person verbal and physical interaction and time outdoors in highly sensory environments that engage children’s senses fully. As is commonly known through the work of Piaget and others, we are now much more aware of the centrality of the role of engaging the senses in children’s learning and development. While screens engage sight, hearing, touch (beyond the screen or keyboard), taste, smell and proprioceptive are not experienced.

This research prompted thoughts of the Hart and Risley 1995 study of now almost thirty years ago, which was focused on the amount and quality of language in children’s environments, tracking children in their homes on a daily basis. I think, while incredibly expensive, this kind of research design would produce the quality of data needed to truly understand children’s screen use. It should also be noted that research on children and screens is in its infancy. There is much more to learn."

"This study contributes valuable longitudinal evidence to an area that is often focused on risks and shaped by concern rather than by strong evidence. The findings suggest that there is little evidence to support screen time having a significant and lasting influence on children’s psychosocial development, except that high levels of screen use in early childhood (five or more hours per day) may be associated with an increased risk of later psychosocial difficulties.

The study highlights that screen use by children and adolescents is more complex than screen time alone, and that simply considering how much time children spend using screens is not the most useful way to understand its effects on development. What matters more is what children are doing on screens, who they are engaging with, and the wider family context in which they are growing up.

For parents and professionals interested in children’s health and wellbeing, the key takeaway is not to ignore screen time, but to move beyond it and focus on the quality and purpose of screen use and on supporting healthy family relationships and functioning, which are factors more likely to help children thrive both on and off screens."

"This study adds to a growing body of evidence that a flat hourly limit is the wrong tool for understanding how screens affect kids.

It lines up with what's known as the Goldilocks pattern - where moderate use isn't harmful and may even help, and it's really heavy use, not simply 'more,' where problems start to show. That challenges the older assumption that every extra hour on a screen is an hour of harm.

I teach digital literacy to pre-service and in-service teachers, many of whom are also parents, and this is one of the things they raise with me most often - they're anxious about their own kids' screen use, and they're also being asked to model and teach 'healthy habits' to students using guidance that hasn't kept pace with the research. This study is a relief for both roles, because eliminating screens isn't realistic - and Australia's current guidelines still use a strict daily cut-off, at a time when researchers here have found parents already feel guilty and confused chasing numbers that don't map onto their real lives.

That doesn't mean anything goes - this study still ties the heaviest use to worse outcomes, and it can't tell us much about content impacts, since it only measured hours, not what kids were actually doing on their screens.

Australia's official guidelines haven't caught up to this shift yet - they're still built around hours per day - while regulators overseas, including the AAP in the US, have started moving toward advice built around content and context instead of the clock.

I think we should pick up on what the authors of this study suggest: that it’s time to move beyond time-based metrics to understand how, when and for who different types of screen use become problematic or helpful. I like how they emphasised some positive aspects of screen-based technology use and how it is possible that these can be harnessed to support healthy development."

"I’ve read this paper, and I think it puts forward a timely and convincing viewpoint that pushes back against the common worries around children using screens. I largely agree with its conclusions. In particular, screen use was not consistently tied to worse developmental outcomes at age five or ten. Any negative associations seen at age 15 only applied to very heavy gaming, not screen time overall.

This careful, nuanced take feels refreshing. The field is often full of overly simplistic warnings, so this kind of balanced analysis is much needed. The findings should be reassuring for parents. Many caregivers fear too much screen time will hurt their kids’ school performance, but this research suggests those fears may be misplaced if screen use is balanced and meaningful.

That said, screen technology is evolving rapidly to create more interactive virtual environments. These represent a separate type of 'virtual screen time' for young learners. Since this study mainly looks at passive mobile screen use, future research could build on these results. Researchers may also look beyond mobile devices to better understand how the immersive virtual experiences shape children’s development."

"As an associate investigator with the nationally funded Australia Research Council Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child, and a researcher who has been talking to families and children about their screen use for over ten years, I am greatly heartened to see the evidence presented by McQuaid et al. (2025) that “screen use was not consistently associated with poorer outcomes for children”. They further argue that “guidelines focusing solely on screen time may have limited impact on psychosocial outcomes”. We at the Centre for the Digital Child have been saying the same for years. What is particularly positive is that this research is longitudinal and able to track outcomes of screen use at 5, 10 and 15 years of age. So often, research findings of one age cohort of digital children are applied to another age group, without consideration for development changes over time.

The world-leading children and technology researcher Professor Sonia Livingstone, herself an associate investigator with the Centre for the Digital Child, lead of the Digital Futures for Children Centre and an advisor on children and technology to the EU, partnered with Australian researchers, such as Professor Lelia Green and me, to explore digital media use in early childhood. In a chapter called ‘Screentime’, we argue that both the risk and opportunities of technology require our attention, but so often attention is all on the risks. This can set off ‘moral panics’ over technological innovation. Parents may be particularly pleased to read this research; the job of tallying up the time their child spends on a screen is one less risk they need to panic about. Australian families also have access to outstanding resources, with both the risks and opportunities well covered, by the eSafety Commissioner.

At the Centre for the Digital Child, with our remit to research young children’s experiences growing up in a rapidly changing digital age, we support parents, educators, policymakers and children. We offer evidence-informed guidance on “healthy family screen use” and “positive uses of digital technology”, showing that it’s not the screentime that may need attention, it is what is done on the screen. Digital technology can enrich play and help children investigate, create and explore. We argue for high-quality online experiences that support a child’s interest. Research such as McQuaid et al.’s article, grounded as it is in longitudinal quantitative evidence, echoes much Digital Child research that is grounded in the voices of families and children themselves. Thus, I express a little cheer when they state that “future research and policy should move beyond time-based metrics” just as the Centre for the Digital Child has been doing. Because, as we know and they demonstrate, a child’s time on screen doesn’t “accurately reflect the complex relationship between screen time and psychosocial development”."

"This study is helpful because it shows longitudinally that there were no clear associations with reported screen time use of children and their mental health outcomes from the age of five up to the age of 15. It examined children from a wide range of sociodemographic backgrounds, which was a real strength of the study.

This work adds to a growing body of research that does not support an interpretation of a substantive link between screen time use and poor mental health and well-being. The link is likely to be far more complex and dependent on a range of other factors (e.g., type of use/ content, other enrichment from the social environment).

It is actually very difficult to tease apart any association; whether it is a cause, consequence or driven by something else. These studies also rely on caregiver and self-reported reports of screen time use, which can be unreliable. So, better quality studies will still be needed.

Parents can take away from this that reports suggesting technology use can cause serious mental health and developmental impacts are premature.

Obviously, you don't want children spending a long time on tech every day doing the same thing. It's always going to be important they have enriching environments (that may include some tech) to support their cognitive development and wellbeing."

"Parents, like me, occasionally worry about how screen use impacts young people’s development - especially behaviour and attention which are vital for learning in school. This was an impressive study on the issue, studying a large (3,786) group of children in Scotland over time.

This study, like others, does not indicate longer-term negative impacts of screen use, finding: ‘Early high screen use was associated with greater difficulties at ten years of age, but this association was not sustained at 15 years of age’. So, the suggestion here is that negative effects of screen time fade if they happen at all. The authors go further, highlighting positive effects of screen time for kids, including ‘Social connections, educational opportunities, and access to information’ - suggesting current guidelines on limiting screen time may need revision.

This conclusion may come as a surprise to some, but let’s hear the research. A critical thought, if we care about kids’ development perhaps we (society, media, governments) are expending too much focus on screen time. In comparison, child poverty, or disadvantage often experienced by kids with a disability in school, are well known to negatively affect development and much more deserving of focus."

There's a chicken-and-egg problem at play here, where most of the analyses are looking at snapshots in time and thus are not able to show the direction of the relationship between screen time and children's mental health. The longitudinal analyses in this study showed that children consuming more than five hours of screen time at age five were nearly three times more likely to have greater psychosocial difficulties by age 10, though the links by age 15 were more tepid. The broader research shows a fairly consistent link between children's heavy screen media use and their mental health, and this study is commendable in how long the follow-up period was, which is rare in the field.

At age five, most children in this study would have been using television as their primary screen media type (in 2010-2011), compared with today's children who are using iPads to watch YouTube channels and streaming services that target preschoolers directly with their content. I have concerns about the differences between digital media like YouTube compared with traditional media - the content is not developed and moderated with children's development in mind, and the algorithms recommending videos are based on maximising watch time rather than what's best for children. Not only is the type of screen time now different, but we also know that the total amount of screen time for today's five-year-olds is substantially higher than in 2010. We may see different outcomes for today's five-year-olds than those in this study, and we need more research like this tracking children today to see how they grow and develop in today's digital environments.

"This study is well conducted, and finds almost no link between screen time and children's emotional and behavioural development.

The primary issue with the paper is not methodology, which is very well done. It is relevance to current childhood.

The paper describes an early childhood that no longer exists. These children were five years old in 2009. The iPhone had been on sale for two years and was still rare in the hands of parents. The iPad did not exist. The saturation of childhood by these devices came in the years afterwards. This means that across the early childhood, the children had almost no exposure to the ubiquity of smart devices as now exists.

This study, therefore, primarily looked at the influence of TV and gaming for young children. This is not the childhood of today, where smart phones and tablets are the primary screens, and are designed to capture attention and hold it for the longest period possible. There is emerging evidence that this type of screen use is associated with increased risks for emotional and behavioural development.

So, the main conclusion from this study is that time spent in front of the TV does not in itself appear to drive emotional and behavioural difficulties. But the impact of the modern smartphones and tablets on the developing child is a different question, and this study cannot answer it. Their early childhood came before the question existed."