The Class Divide Over Screen Time

How technology is creating new class divides

Photo by Frank Okay on Unsplash

When you think about the way technology affects the division of classes, you might assume that the wealthy have access to the best technology and the middle class have access to mass technology, and the lower class have access to little or no technology. And so what divides us is that the wealthy can get ahead with their advanced technology, leaving the rest of us behind. And maybe, in some dystopian future, that will be the case. The wealthy will be able to afford genetically designed super-babies while the rest of us are left to nature and our puny brains. But that is not the reality today.

Today, for the most part, the wealthy, middle class, and lower class, all have access to the same mass technology. An iPhone is an iPhone is an iPhone. Instagram is Instagram is Instagram. The Internet is the Internet, even if you have to use it on a slow computer. Obviously there are differences at the margins of the classes, and I don’t mean to diminish the reality that some cannot afford phones or the Internet. But it’s also the case that many Americans can afford these technologies. And it gives them access to a wide world of entertainment and information. And what we discover is, that the divide which opens up with technology between the classes is not between who has technology and who doesn’t, but who moderates their use of technology and who doesn’t.

A recent survey done by Common Sense Media shows the class gap between screen time among children in middle/upper class households and lower class households.

Stephanie H. Murray

writes: “Children from households on the lower end of the income spectrum (less than $50,000 per year) spend nearly 4 hours on screens daily, about double the screen time of kids in higher income households ($100,000 plus).”

I have seen this behavior first hand and it is depressing. Why is it that those lower on the income spectrum are more likely to allow their children to have excessive amounts of screen time?

I think a number of forces are at work here.

For one, we must look at the school systems. Wealthy and highly educated families are often aware of the dangers of screens and opt to put their kids in schools where technology use is minimal and smartphones are banned, whereas poorer schools hand children tablets from an early age. In addition to harming the education of students, these devices normalize screen time for the children, creating an expectation that they should be staring at a screen even at home.

Second, the reality is that the less income you have, the less resources you have to care for your children. This includes having less income to spend on childcare, but also less emotional and mental bandwidth to care for your children because of the burdens poverty places upon you. Life is just more stressful when you have to worry about how you will pay your next electric bill. In addition, there is a good chance that you don’t have a good community support system, the kind that can come over and watch the kids while you take a nap or clean the house. How do you cope with this lack of resources? The easiest solution is to put a screen in front of your child. They’ll be happy and quiet and you’ll get time to yourself. In the past, the answer was to put them in front of a TV. Today, it looks like YouTube or games on an iPad.

Third, I suspect that if we had data on adult screen time usage across income levels, we’d find that there’s higher usage among lower income levels as well. This is a hunch, but it’s based on the premise that screens are the most common maladaptive coping mechanism in the modern West to deal with anxiety, stress, loneliness, alienation, meaninglessness, and depression—all experiences that can correlate with the experience of being poor. Children mimic what they see their parents doing, so if young children see their parents constantly numbing themselves by scrolling on their phones, naturally they will expect to do the same, if given the opportunity. And thanks to the relatively low cost of tablets and basic Internet access, they can be given the opportunity.

Fourth, speaking of maladaptive coping mechanisms, for many children, especially young children who don’t have access to other forms of escape or substance abuse, screen time may provide a soothing, addictive form of coping with the stress and uncertainty of poverty. This is especially the case when financial insecurity comes with relationship insecurity: divorce, mom’s new boyfriend living in the house, and so on. Here the screen provides a safe place to escape the chaotic world of the home.

Fifth, I think among some people with a lower income status there is a sense that life has to be enjoyed today because you can’t trust in tomorrow. And they apply this to their children as well. If their kids enjoy playing a video game, what’s the harm in letting them play for a few hours each day? What’s the harm in letting them post dance videos on TikTok as pre-teens if it makes them happy? You could try to explain the harm based on the data people like Jonathan Haidt have collected, but it won’t matter because it’s not tangible in the present moment. There’s a kind of hedonistic despair that refuses to allow them to hope for tomorrow and delay gratification. The world has just beaten them down too many times for them to have hope.

I hope what all this shows is that the causes behind the screen time gap are the conditions of poverty itself. And to address this gap is to address poverty at its root, as a system of interlocking woes. It is not enough to run an ad campaign targeting lower class neighborhoods encouraging parents to read to their kids and reduce screen time. Poor people don’t need more shame added to their lives. Work needs to be done to make families whole, provide meaningful (and meaningfully paying) jobs, give hope for tomorrow, develop healthy communities, and remove devices from schools. Churches can be at the forefront of this work in local communities, and often are. But there is much more work to be done.

The alternative is that we allow things to remain the same and watch as the gap grows wider and wider. As those who are severely addicted to their devices lose more of their attention spans, get more and more misinformation from social media, have their body images distorted, and are more easily manipulated by algorithms and AI. While the wealthy practice temperance and build the machines that create the algorithms and AI.

What separates the classes is not primarily who can afford the latest technology but who can resist addiction to the latest technology. Whatever our economic status, as Paul tells us in Philippians 4:11-12, we can learn to be content. I would add that we can learn to be temperate. But the reality is that poverty makes it harder to avoid the pull of the screen for the reasons listed above. Advocating for devices to be taken out of and banned from schools and working toward holistic poverty alleviation are ways we can fight this gap. Shaming the poor for giving their kids too much screen time won’t help.