Screens have a major influence!
Screen use and social media are issues that all teenagers have to deal with. For many teenagers, they are a reason why it is difficult to go to sleep on time, resulting in shorter and poorer-quality nights. Many of them, particularly girls, feel pressure to live up to the perfect image (58%) that social media apps such as Instagram and TikTok present to them as reality.
Many (social media) apps also frequently send push notifications that arrive immediately and demand attention, making it even more difficult to put the phone away and go to sleep (24%). In addition, teenagers experience the social expectation that they should respond quickly to each other’s messages. Not responding immediately when you are online and the WhatsApp ticks are blue is difficult. From this perspective, it is therefore easy to understand why many teenagers only go to sleep after updating their social media and responding to outstanding notifications and messages (45%). This obviously seems to become a vicious circle when friends do the same and everyone remains active online until late (24%).
An important result from the current study is that teenagers who have (or are given) clear rules or agreements at home from their parents or caregivers about screen use, including monitoring compliance with them (!), sleep an average of one hour longer every night than teenagers who do not have such rules or whose compliance is not monitored by their parents or caregivers!
It is also striking that many teenagers still frequently receive school notifications in the evening about, for example, grades, homework and/or timetable changes (63%). This can cause a great deal of stress and unrest, particularly because their parents receive the same push notifications on the same apps at the same time. This can lead to stress and sometimes even arguments late into the evening, which obviously does not benefit the teenager’s night’s rest. In this way, schools (unintentionally) contribute to excessive screen use late in the evening and, indirectly, to the deterioration of both teenagers’ sleep health and academic performance.
The results come from the study conducted as part of the ‘Charge Your Brainzzz’ project by, among others, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the University of Amsterdam and GGD Amsterdam, in collaboration with TeamAlert, the Netherlands Youth Institute (NJI), JOGG, MIND and several other GGD regions, among the TeamAlert youth panel, and funded by ZonMw and the Brain Foundation.
Read the first article, VMBO students are not getting enough sleep, here.
Want to know more? The full report can be read here.