Quebec not ruling out legislation on screen time for youth

The Legault government has not ruled out legislating the use of screens by young people and families. That’s what Social Services Minister Lionel Carmant suggested in a speech Monday morning in Montreal.

Speaking at the International Symposium on Screen Use and Health, Carmant said the government would soon begin working on the second Quebec strategy on screen use and the health of young people.

“We want a version that’s very much adapted to Quebec’s reality,” said Carmant. “And I’ll tell you right now, nothing is off the table. If we have to legislate, we’ll legislate.”

He gave no further details on possible legislation, but stressed that “it’s all a question of striking the right balance between raising awareness and developing the digital skills of young people.”

On Tuesday during a press conference the National Assembly, Premier François Legault reiterated the concerns about screen time. “Right now, the challenge is about at home with the parents, so it’s not easy, solutions are not easy, but we’re open to all the suggestions. And Mr. Carmant is working on that since four years now.”

Parent of two and president of the English Parents’ Committee Association, Katherine Korakakis, says this approach of legislating would be misguided and heading in the wrong direction for the needs of students. 

“Every family has different realities, like you can be in a household where you have older siblings and it’s hard to control that, but what you can do is in school teach them about this real addiction,” she said. “Just like we teach about drug awareness, why aren’t we teaching about how to be a good digital citizen? It’s the same thing.”

Korakakis has two teenagers, aged 13 and 16, and says she knows first hands the negative impacts of screen time. 

“Very difficult to the point of one of my children has been hospitalized because of mental health stemming from watching a lot of TikTok,” she said. “It’s not like we’re not there, it’s not like we’re not present, but I’m not there 24/7. So I can tell you firsthand how important it is to educate children.”

Clinical psychologist and Director of the Teenage Health Unit at the Goldman Herzl Family Practice Centre of Montreal’s Jewish General Hospital, Dr. Perry Adler, agrees.

“I don’t believe that most people understand how detrimental elevated screen time is to the mental mental health of anybody, but particularly the young people,” he said. “There’s this growing body of literature that indicates that the more screen time that a child uses the less they’re able to develop the proper social skills and executive function, so we are rewiring an entire generation of brains.”

Another “horrible” aspect of screen use is social media use, Dr. Adler says.

“It’s actually worse than video game use in that inherently as humans we like to compare with others, and typically what’s presented in social media are curated views of peoples lives are like so people are led to believe that everybody else is leading more interesting and more successful lives than we are, and as a result of these comparisons, our entire population is coming away from their hours of social media use feeling inadequate compared to what they think is the norm, which is a false representation norm, and that leads to social anxiety, depression, eating disorders and other types of mental health disorders.”

In 2020, 59 per cent of Quebec youth between 13 and 17 used the internet for more than 10 hours a week, compared with 27 per cent of those aged six to 12.

According to data from the Enquête québécoise sur le tabac, l’alcool, la drogue et le jeu chez les élèves du secondaire (Quebec survey on tobacco, alcohol, drugs and gambling among secondary school students), 18 per cent of them often or very often have trouble stopping when surfing the internet. The survey also found that 10 per cent of young people reported having often or very often tried to spend less time online without succeeding.

The data also showed that 45.5 per cent of high school students would exceed the recommendation associated with their age group when it comes to screen use in their free time. This applies to both passive use (watching series, films or videos) and active or interactive use (video games, chatting or surfing the web).

“With little kids, they play with these platforms, they have fun with them, but they have no idea what is like to go out and play with the ball,” said Dr. Linda Pagani, a professor at the School of Psychoeducation of Université de Montréal and researcher at CHU Sainte-Justine Research Center. “They don’t think that physical play is important anymore and physical play’s incredibly important for brain development, for testing your limits, for developing your balance.”

She says the issue is so severe it should be legislated, just like the use of tobacco and seatbelts in vehicles.

“Whenever something is legislated it has an impact on the way people behave,” she said. “These platforms are designed like sugar or heroin. They have algorithms that make you need to go back on and it’s quite sad, so what happens is that by letting these into daycares, by letting these schools, it interrupts the normal developmental processes that happen in childhood.”

“We absolutely must support our young people in their use of these technologies so that they can understand the risks and use them appropriately. This is an important part of what I see as our role as a government […] to get them to think about their own use of screens,” said Carmant.

He emphasized improving mental health data “for both young and old.”

The minister pointed out that current research shows that social media networks are transforming the way people perceive themselves and that this is worsening anxiety and mental health problems in general, “not to mention the sleep-related complications for our young people who use social media well after bedtime,” he added.

The Legault government has already tackled the issues posed by screens in schools. As of this year, Quebec became the second province after Ontario to ban cellphones in the classroom. “I think that was the right solution, but there are a lot of other decisions that need to be made fairly quickly,” Carmant said.

In the Stratégie québécoise sur l’utilisation des écrans et la santé des jeunes 2022-2025, the emphasis was mainly on raising awareness. It said that children under two years old should never be exposed to screens and that after this age, screen use should be limited to one hour a day until they start school.

“I think that if you want to make meaningful change, you have to do something at the education level like we’ve been advocating now for years,” said Korakakis.

–With files from La Presse Canadienne