Smartphone addiction among children & teens shows problematic mental health symptoms

December 2: Is your child a smartphone addict? One in four young people are ‘addicted’ to smartphones! Read this piece to find out the answer to this question which mostly trouble the parents of this digital age.

Excessive smartphone usage especially by the children and teenagers results in poor measures of mental health in terms of depressed mood, anxiety, stress, poor sleep quality and educational attainment. This was revealed in a study conducted by researchers from King’s College London in the United Kingdom.

The study, published in the journal ‘BMC Psychiatry’, is the first to investigate the prevalence of Problematic Smartphone Usage (PSU) in children and young people at this scale, summarising findings from 41 studies that researched a total of 41,871 teenagers and young people. PSU was defined as any behaviour linked to smartphones that has the features of an addiction, such as feeling panicky or upset when the phone is unavailable. The behaviour is also characterised by people finding it difficult to control the amount of time spent on the phone, and using the phone to the detriment of other enjoyable activities.

Love them or hate them, smartphones have become ubiquitous in everyday life. And while they have many positive uses, people remain concerned about the potential negative harms of excessively using them – especially in children and teens. However, alongside this increase in smartphone use, studies have also shown mental health has become worse in this age group.

Over the past decade there has been an increase in smartphone use among children and young people and this has occurred at the same time as a rise in common mental disorders in the same age group, the researchers noted. Samantha Sohn from the King’s College London, the first author of this study says that most questionnaires agreed that the central features of a behavioural addiction include:

• having an intense urge to use your phone
• spending more time on it than you first intended to
• feeling panicked if it runs out of battery
• neglecting other more important things to use it
• having other people complain about how much someone used their phone
• continuing to use it despite knowing how much it affected other areas of your life, including sleep or school work.

In order for a young person to be defined as exhibiting problematic smartphone usage, they had to exhibit at least two of these features.

Nicola Kalk from the King’s College London said, “Smartphones are here to stay and there is a need to understand the prevalence of problematic smartphone usage. We don’t know whether it is the smartphone itself that can be addictive or the apps that people use.”