Opinion: we are blaming the wrong screens

The conversation about screens has been stuck in the same place for years. Concerned articles announce that teenagers spend too much time on their phones, parents nod sadly, and nothing much changes. The framing is comfortable but, I would argue, misleading. Not all screen time is the same. An hour of mindless scrolling on a social network is genuinely different from an hour spent learning to code, watching a documentary, or messaging a friend who lives abroad. Lumping all of these into a single number — 'screen time' — and worrying about its size is roughly as useful as counting the calories in your fridge without distinguishing between vegetables and chocolate. The deeper issue is design. Many apps that dominate teenage attention have been engineered, with extraordinary skill, to be as compulsive as possible. The infinite scroll, the unpredictable rewards, the notifications: these are not accidents. They are the product of teams of designers and behavioural scientists trying to maximise the time you spend in the app. Telling teenagers to use their willpower against this is a bit like telling them to outrun a car. A few will manage it, most will fail, and many will end up feeling defective. If we want a serious conversation about screens, we should focus less on parental restrictions and more on platform design. The companies building these tools could easily make them less addictive. They just don't, because addictive is profitable.