Pandemic lockdowns roughly doubled one cohort's screen time

The short answer

A study published in JAMA Pediatrics found that US adolescents in a large research cohort reported roughly double their usual recreational screen time during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic. The finding describes a sharp, unusual shock rather than a new permanent baseline, and it relies on adolescents' own estimates.

What the evidence says

Screen Time Use Among US Adolescents During the COVID-19 Pandemic, published online 1 November 2021 by Jason Nagata and colleagues, analysed a May 2020 survey of 5,412 adolescents in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, a long-running, NIH-funded cohort of 11,880 children recruited at ages 9 to 10 across 21 US sites and followed over time. Comparing the May 2020 responses with the same cohort's prepandemic baseline, average daily recreational screen time rose from about 3.8 hours to 7.70 hours, made up mostly of streaming video (2.42 hours), multiplayer gaming (1.44 hours) and single-player gaming (1.17 hours). The increase was uneven: Black adolescents in the sample reported an average of 10.06 hours a day, compared with 6.60 hours among Asian adolescents. Higher perceived stress and poorer mental health were associated with more screen use, while stronger social support and coping skills were associated with less.

For context

The authors note their own limitations plainly: the data are self-reported, and because adolescents often use more than one screen at once, the total may overstate time spent on any single activity. A single cross-sectional survey taken during an extraordinary few months, with schools closed and normal activities suspended, describes that moment rather than a durable shift, and the ABCD cohort's longer-running data would be needed to see whether use settled back down in later years. The size of the jump also cannot be separated from what caused it: remote schooling itself required screen use that this recreational-time measure was designed to exclude, but the boundary between school and leisure use blurred for many households during lockdowns.

A practical next step

If you are comparing a stressful period's screen habits with the numbers reported here, it may help to treat this as a description of one unusual season rather than a target or a warning about your own child's ordinary routine, and to ask what has changed since rather than measuring against a pandemic peak.

• Is our current routine closer to a genuine pattern or to a temporary response to a stressful stretch, such as illness, a house move or exams?
• Does my teenager's own account of their screen time roughly match a device's logged figures, or is there a gap worth noticing?
• Has our household's boundary between schoolwork and recreational screen use become blurred, and would it help to separate them again?

The ABCD Study will keep following the same young people, which is the best way to learn whether the 2020 spike was a one-off or the start of a lasting change, and later waves of that cohort are worth watching rather than treating this single snapshot as the final word.