Screen addiction poses serious public health threat to children, researchers warn

A comprehensive review of nearly 2,800 studies involving more than nine million participants has landed on a conclusion that researchers say demands urgent action: excessive screen time is harming the physical and mental health of millions of children worldwide. The analysis, published Sunday in The Lancet, found that children under ten who spend too much time on digital devices sleep less and show measurable delays in cognitive, emotional, and social development. For young people between ten and twenty-four, the harms expand into a darker territory—mental health problems, reduced physical activity, substance abuse, self-harm, and suicidal ideation all correlate with heavy screen use.

Andrea Chrysanthou, a Toronto parent and board chair of the advocacy group Children First Canada, knows this struggle intimately. Her thirteen-year-old son has asked her for help breaking what he himself recognizes as an addiction. The moment she looks away, he reaches for his device again. His experience mirrors that of millions of other young people caught in a cycle their parents struggle to interrupt.

Jay Shaw, an assistant professor in the University of Toronto's Department of Physical Therapy and a co-author of the research series, says the breadth of the analysis reveals what needs to happen to protect children. But he and his colleagues face a fundamental obstacle: they cannot fully understand or address the severity of the problem without access to the user data held by tech companies themselves—data those companies are currently under no legal obligation to share. The research makes a clear case that screen addiction among young people is a public health issue requiring government intervention, yet the companies designing these platforms remain largely unaccountable to the researchers studying their effects.

Dr. Rachel Mitchell, a psychiatrist at Toronto's Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, points to a critical asymmetry. Most digital platforms were not designed with young people in mind, yet children and adolescents—whose brains are still developing—are the most vulnerable to their architecture. These platforms bombard users with digital distractions through autoplay, push notifications, gamification, and daily rewards designed to capture constant attention. Mitchell notes the irony sharply: adults with fully developed frontal lobes struggle to regulate their own screen use. Expecting children to do so, she says, defies logic.

Shaw draws a parallel to smoking, suggesting society may be at its "so-called big tobacco moment" with technology. The addictive nature of social media and digital platforms should trigger the same kind of public health intervention that followed decades of evidence about tobacco. If governments and companies don't act decisively, he warns, digital technologies risk becoming more harmful than beneficial to public health overall.

Mitchell resists the comparison, however. Unlike cigarettes, digital devices serve genuine purposes—navigation, education, connection, learning. The Lancet review itself documents positive benefits when these technologies are used in moderation and for educational purposes. The challenge, then, is not elimination but management. Mitchell argues that the risks have become so widespread and so severe that individual families can no longer manage them alone. Government intervention and corporate responsibility are no longer optional; they are ethically necessary.

Some companies have begun moving. Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram, agreed in August to implement age limits in the United States as part of an eighteen-billion-dollar settlement—described as the largest state consumer protection settlement in history outside the tobacco litigation of the 1990s. TikTok defaults to a one-hour usage limit for users aged thirteen to seventeen, though the setting can be disabled. Snap's leadership has signaled openness to time restrictions for teenagers. Mitchell calls such measures "absolutely necessary" and notes they should have existed from the start.

The real barrier to progress, Shaw and his colleagues argue, is transparency. Tech giants like Meta, TikTok, and Google face no obligation to share user data or explain how their algorithms extend engagement, particularly among young people. Mitchell calls this morally and ethically indefensible. Canada's proposed Safe Social Media Act, if passed, would compel platforms to provide accredited researchers with access to data related to online safety and would require age restrictions for children under sixteen unless adequate safeguards are in place. The bill has drawn criticism over potential Charter violations and has not yet been debated in Parliament.

Chrysanthou and the researchers stop short of calling for an outright ban on youth social media use. In Australia, where age limits were implemented earlier this year, many young people have found ways around the restrictions, or companies have failed to enforce them effectively. What Chrysanthou wants is clear: companies and platforms must take responsibility for making their services safe. Regulation around screen time matters, but so does corporate accountability. The question now is whether governments will act before the harms documented in this research become even more entrenched in the lives of the next generation.