Notes

Addictive consumer technology is getting to kids. A massive study on children’s screen time and mental health—following more than 4,200 young people across the U.S. for four years, and published on Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association—found no correlation between the longer screen time at age 10 and suicidal behaviors at age 14. It found something more specific.

The children most at risk for suicidal tendencies were those who used technology in an addictive way—meaning, they had trouble putting it down or felt the need to use it more and more. At age 14, kids with high or increasingly addictive behaviors were two to three times as likely as the others to have suicidal thoughts or to harm themselves.

The problem is, addictive usage is very common. When it comes to mobile phones, almost half of the children showed addictive usage. And addictive usage is more common among minorities and children in families at lower socio-economic levels.

So what now?