Technology use explains at most 0.4% of adolescent wellbeing

A study of 300,000 adolescents and parents in the UK and USA shows that only 0.4% of wellbeing in adolescents is associated with technology use. Comparatively, eating potatoes has nearly as negative effect and wearing glasses has a more negative effect on adolescent mental health then screen use. Researchers at the University of Oxford have performed the most definitive study to date on the relationship between technology use and adolescent mental health, examining data from over 300,000 teenagers and parents in the UK and USA. At most, only 0.4% of adolescent wellbeing is related to screen use - which only slightly surpasses the negative effect of regularly eating potatoes. 'Our findings demonstrate that screen use itself has at most a tiny association with youth mental health,' said lead researcher Professor Andrew Przybylski, Director of Research at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. 'The 0.4% contribution of screen use on young people's mental health needs to be put in context for parents and policymakers. Within the same dataset, we were able to demonstrate that including potatoes in your diet showed a similar association with adolescent wellbeing. Wearing corrective lenses had an even worse association.' In comparison, smoking marijuana and being bullied was found, on average, to have a 2.7 times and 4.3 times more negative association with adolescent mental health than screen use.