Sedentary behavior, screens and their negative
impacts are increasingly ignored.
The remedies to these habits won’t come easily.

Sedentary Behavior & Your Device

When I used to work for an after-school daycare, I would watch television on my laptop with the kids to help stall some of the screaming and crying that was so trendy in the gym we were all stuck in together. Personally, I didn’t really think much of it and I always tried to limit the number of episodes to around 2 or 3, averaging around 20 minutes each with no advertisements. Within about one week, this became the children’s most favorite thing to do, more so than eating crackers, talking, playing ball, or swinging on the swing set. Eventually, it became the only thing that the 4-year olds wanted to do, and suddenly without it came more screaming, crying and begging.

There is a growing concern that how we manage children’s time should not be with screens but understandably, opinions vary among even the closest friends on what is ‘good’ parenting. Stories about screen time with the family is familiar among the home life too, and statistics show that the average 3 to 4-year-old in UK now spends about 8 hours in front of some kind of screen. This average screen time only increases with age. Stunning figures like this mean that kids are not being physically active and are instead indulging in sedentary behaviors like this which are tightly linked to obesity, depression, and poorer overall wellbeing.

But, if our kids have a screen problem, then so do we adults.
Not only are we developing health problems from gorging on our screens, but we also face obstacles managing our addictions to them.

Investigating the implications of screen-time addictions on user wellbeing and the proposed solutions reveals just how all-encompassing the situation is. It leads to discovering that a lot of time and money is being invested into “Wellbeing” applications and their design to help users find more balance between screens, their kid’s screens, and their life away from screens. Parents are being asked to monitor their kids screen time usage and supposedly Google wants to help.

Wellbeing within your device

If you go to your settings on your phone, search for “Wellbeing” and see if your operating system has “Digital Wellbeing” built in. If it does, open it and look at all of the screen-time usage you have been consuming, as well as the tools that supposedly help you limit and self-manage your and your kids’ habits on the device.

Perhaps reflect on how many times your device has been unlocked today or the YouTube app; is it more than one hundred? In order to tackle excessive phone and device usage, app developers have begun designing these apps in their operating systems that are focused on your behavior as a user and claim to help empower you to now manage these habits for your benefit.

Digital Wellbeing by Google has been baked into their Android operating system for about two years now, with the tools and stats assumed necessary to help its users. Alas, these applications are not showing recovery for its users in the long term and fail to tackle even the more fundamental characteristics of behaviors associated with addictions. These tools are not developing better long-term behaviors. For instance, they do not reward you for putting your phone on silent, or off, during a lunch break. This is an easy way to start building a positive habit with your digital tool, but it isn’t supported. There is no acknowledgment of positive, goal-situated, progress.

These Wellbeing applications do not have fundamental habit-forming cues for users either, like putting the device away one hour before bed, which has shown to be an easy routine that can actually increase your sleep quality. These applications do show success in the short-term, breaking habits that users make by showing self-reported data and feature blocking. From this, users engage an app for shorter periods or are notified that they use an app too long, but without the key reward and supportive systems normally used in psychological and rehabilitation practices, users most often fall back into old habits.

Wellbeing applications have an opportunity to be one of the most important behavior forming applications ever to be put in front of people’s faces, including your child’s. Although limited in their current state, the applications do allow for real, informed conversations among families and friends about the amount of personal (and sometime shared) screen time being consumed. Not only do they open space for new conversations and reflections, but wellbeing applications help illustrate what kind of relationships we want to have with our devices.

If your screen time statistics show that you only use your phone for 8 hours of YouTube videos and WhatsApp, then maybe you need to consider an app-timer that cuts you off from these features after a certain time. Personally, I limit my use of the Reddit application to 45 minutes on my phone and not surprisingly, every day I gobble up that 45 minutes quite happily. Although shaping more responsible time management on a device seems possible for adults aware of their behaviors, it is not realistic for more vulnerable persons like children.

A question then arises, “What kind childhood do I want my kids to remember?”, where parents could take a moment to reflect on their own past. Some of my best childhood memories were spent outside with friends or seeing extended family for large dinners. Of course, I have nostalgic feelings for video games I grew up with and the famous Disney movies I watched with friends; but electronic media and screen time is proving to not be a neutral practice. Again, research in extensive screen time usage in children and young adults is showing correlations to rising inattention, internalizing problems, and even lower psychological welfare.

In order to take on big questions of how to deal with our screen time addictions, we will have to ask what kind of wellbeing we want for ourselves and our children and if these devices help or hurt reaching those ambitions. Tools like ‘Digital Wellbeing’ can only do so much of the work of informing and limiting our use of our devices. It seems that without better design and consideration for wellbeing in both our devices and our own conversations with each other, there will continue to be a rise in sedentary behaviors. Behaviors that many of us seem to be struggling to break free from at work, when getting home and when interacting with our families.

Overstimulation in the face of Wellbeing

What this discussion can bridge into is a consideration of the broader social context around comprehensive stimulation of people. In other words, the screens and wellbeing we try to derive from technologies cannot be isolated to just the individual. It requires stepping away from the pixels of our phones and looking at our industrialized modern culture at large. There is an argument to be made that living an overstimulating lifestyle diminishes wellbeing over our lifetimes.

Wrapping ‘screen time’ neatly into the societal dialogue on individual and communal wellbeing requires us to acknowledge that we already undervalue our senses. By this, I mean that to accept we should always be stimulated by artificial lighting, loud noises, unwarranted notifications and over-saturated imagery; these lifestyle and community choices impacts and diminishes overall welfare for everyone. The clutter that is billboards, electronic posters, moving monitors and other mass media culminate into an excessive and dramatic expansion of flashy technological artifacts that have been largely ignored by contemporary research and discussion on human health. Whose attention is being grabbed most often and for what purposes? What does it mean when children and elderly are some of the most targeted groups of attention grabbing content? These artifacts are, as it were, a selfish and effective way in which our commercial culture have shaped the environment and neighborhoods around us, developing an ever pervasive ‘attention economy’.

This kind of economy is shaped by our digital activity and there are numerous ways that different socially engaging apps try to tap into your attention. From random push notifications, to infinite scrolling, to constantly recommending new avenues of connection and opportunity; there are moments where time simply evaporates through our screens without us even sensing it. What is known, is that companies make very good money from your attention, clicks, and shared data. What is not always clear, is how we should talk about wellbeing in regard to time spent like this. Have we created new addictions? Or perhaps it is more accurate to call them “technological habits“? Ironically, frustration rises for many on wellbeing conversations about screen time not because of a lack of content, but because of the sheer amount of dialogue happening in research communities on the topic.

How do we tackle distraction that is built into both our digital and tactile infrastructures? What does it mean to have children developing in a world of products designed to distract them? Are current wellbeing applications sufficient for curbing our attention with devices that are designed for its manipulation? Approaching these questions requires both a societal discussion and an individual recognition that technologies shape the very tangible norms and values that build our communities. Raising awareness about the constant wave of provocation and excitement means critically examining the technologies we design and bring into our homes. Both our children and ourselves deserve to not feel manipulated and coerced by the sources of information and entertainment we consume on a daily basis. Without having these conversations with our friends and family, we continue to ignore the ways in which technologies shape our everyday practices, both at the dinner table and at school.

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Cover image thanks to Photo by Giovanni Gagliardi on Unsplash