“Looking at the screen for a long time has a negative impact on their eyes as well. They suffer from headaches. If we visit some place, the first thing they ask for is a phone. I tried to teach them social manners and meet the guests visiting us at home, like we used to do in our childhood. Even then I feel they’re becoming self-centered due to using mobile phones.”
Screen addiction can be a disease sometimes, said Associate Professor Mekhla Sarkar of the National Institute of Mental Health and Hospital.
The American Psychiatric Association published the fifth edition of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders where they included “internet gaming disorder” as a mental disease.
When children, adolescents or even adults feel compelled to use screens and keep increasing the use while ignoring self care, work, socialization and relationships, it can be called addiction, Mekhla Sarkar explained.
WHAT DOES FOREIGN RESEARCH SAY?
Amy Orben, an experimental psychologist at the University of Cambridge, UK, and her colleagues published a research paper last year where they found “windows of developmental sensitivity” – where social media use is associated with a later period of lower life satisfaction – at specific ages during adolescence.
Analyzing data from over 17,000 participants aged between 10 and 21, the researchers found that higher use of social media at ages 11 to 13 for girls, and 14 to 15 for boys, predicted lower life satisfaction a year later. The reverse was also true: lower social media use at this age predicted higher life satisfaction the following year.
“Being a teenager is really a major time of development,” says Orben. “You’re much more impacted by your peers, you’re much more interested in what other people think about you. And the design of social media – the way that it provides social contact and feedback on, more or less, a click of a button – might be more stressful at certain times.”
SOMETHING ‘POSITIVE’
Although worried about her children’s habit of using a screen, Nusrat believes they can learn something positive from it.
“My daughter could already draw, but she learned more from the internet during the pandemic and drew very nice pictures. She learned many other things from the internet or watching YouTube on her phone.”
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