After
touring secondary schools and surveying students ages 13-18, the founder of a British
“digital detox” company said she’ll expand its services this spring to include
teenagers.
Tanya
Goodin of Time To Log Off found that 29% of the young people she polled said
they spend more than eight hours a day online, and more than a third regularly
fall asleep at night with their phone or laptop in bed with them.
In
the U.S., in response to a December 2016 survey of more than 4,500 college
students by NACS’ OnCampus Research, a quarter said they spend two hours every
day on social media, 19% said three hours, 14% said four hours, and 9% said
five hours. Three percent admitted actually devoting 10 hours every day to
social media.
Unlike
Internet-addiction treatment centers in China, which are run more like army boot
camps, Time To Log Off’s three-day teen retreats in Britain will emphasize
team-building and creative activities such as painting, cooking, and
photography.
Richard Graham, a London
psychiatrist, told The Guardian newspaper that
schools should be looking into running their own digital-detox programs,
especially close to midterm and final exams. He said what’s needed is a
“systemwide approach, with clean times and clean zones where everyone switches
off.”