On Tuesday 20 November, the Senate adopted a bill aimed at combating the early and massive exposure of young children to screens. The text requires manufacturers of digital tools and games with a screen to include in their packaging a message warning parents of the dangers of screens for children under 3. It also provides that advertisements for televisions, smartphones, laptops, tablets and digital games must carry a health warning, modelled on those that accompany sugary drinks or foods. The text received the support of all the Senate groups, including LREM, and was passed by 333 votes to 2. Curiously, the government judged it insufficiently substantiated, even though such recommendations already appear in children’s health record books.
Validating the doubts of many parents
This cautious and measured bill is intended as a contribution to making citizens aware of the risks of screens for the youngest children. Nothing more, but nothing less. Indeed, such a measure, if passed, would not only encourage the parents of children under three to be cautious in their use of digital tools. It would also lead the parents of older children to ask themselves whether it is a good idea to let a three-and-a-half-year-old use without limit a digital tool that is not recommended for those under three. And step by step, the benefit of the doubt enjoyed by manufacturers of digital products would be chipped away. That is why this bill, however measured it may be, is running up against the lobby of digital product manufacturers, who are watching anxiously as a breach opens in the gigantic market they enjoy without any control.
Enabling paediatricians and GPs to become information relays
If most parents take so long to be informed about the risks of screen use in young children, it is also because the various professionals they deal with often hesitate to take the initiative of talking to them about it. General practitioners and paediatricians, in particular, fear that questions about the importance given to screens in the family will be seen as intrusive. But if this law were passed, many parents would probably turn to their GP or paediatrician to raise the question of young children’s use of screens with them. And it would also be easier for these professionals to take the initiative.
Are screens dangerous, or is it their use that is risky?
The fact that politicians are taking an interest in this question shows that a growing number of parents – and therefore voters – are worried about the omnipresence of screens in young children’s lives. But this shift in part of public opinion is not always, far from it, based on reasonable arguments. Conspiracy theories, in the field of screens as in that of vaccines, wreak widespread havoc on the capacity for thought of a large part of the public.
Indeed, some discourse on screens maintains a confusion between the risks linked to excessive and early use and their possible intrinsic danger at any age. Risk assessment follows the logic of the dimmer switch, which makes it possible to adjust the intensity and/or duration of children’s exposure to reasonable doses according to their level of development. By contrast, the assessment of danger obeys an all-or-nothing law, and would correspond more to the “on/off” switch model. Yet screens are not dangerous in themselves, but present risks linked to their misuse. The measures recommended in the two cases are different. Speaking in terms of danger means appealing to politicians and demanding laws that “prohibit”. Whereas risk assessment invites us to put the emphasis on parental and family education. That is the aim of this bill.
What is at stake in the vote
If the bill is passed, those who see politics and constraint as the solution to the educational questions raised by screens will unfortunately cry that they have scored a point, and that the state must harden its position. Fortunately, it will also become easier for those who are convinced of the risks incurred by young children to convince those who are less so, and easier for childhood professionals to inform parents.
If, on the other hand, the bill is rejected, those who stress the dangers of screens will blame the lobbies and take the opportunity to accuse at the same time those who reason in terms of risks rather than dangers of being their accomplices, or even of being bought by them. Focusing the fight on education rather than denunciation risks becoming harder still.
The fight will therefore go on, whatever happens, and it will have to, as today, be waged on two fronts. On one side, fighting the lobby of digital product manufacturers, who do not want doubt to creep into parents’ minds about the unrestrained use of digital objects. And on the other, continuing to remind people that screens also offer tremendous educational possibilities. In other words, that it is just as important to learn how to use them as to learn how to do without them.
Serge Tisseron is a psychiatrist, holds a doctorate in psychology with accreditation to supervise research, is a member of the Académie des technologies, and is an associate researcher at Université Paris VII Denis Diderot (CRPMS).
