Many students have been noticing dramatic changes in their amount of screen time due to having to do distance learning.

“I’m on my Chromebook all day and after school I like playing video games,” sophomore Gavin Ferris said.

Each class has an hour long time frame, with 4 classes total, and an hour long lunch. This means there is  4 hours required of being on a screen to attend class.

“I play a lot more because I’m not normally allowed to play during the week but since it’s at home school my parents don’t care,” Ferris said.

This happens for a lot of kids because when they are at home and are not able to do any extracurricular activities, they tend to sit inside and play video games.

Many kids find it hard to still have things to do when they are not able to meet with friends.  They may tend to play video games with friends online due to this issue.

“So that’s four [hours of school] and like an hour and a half on my phone [on] average, and like 4 or 5 hours for Xbox so that’s 10 total,” Ferris said.

The Washington Post claims, “On average, American 8-to-12-year-olds spent 4 hours and 44 minutes on screen media each day, and teens average 7 hours and 22 minutes.” 

With online school, students may be averaging at least 3 more hours per day than the average teen due to online school.

“We’re home a lot more often and it’s a lot easier to pull out my phone and just go on it,” sophomore Josh Gregorich said.

Online school is requiring lots of screen time, as well as the fact that teens are on their phones more often talking with friends. This can lead to not being able to sleep, get blurry vision, and headaches. Many kids are having these problems, but this is an issue that we might have to deal with as long as we have distanced learning.

“I think it should be how it was in March, just drop the assignments in the beginning of the week and then they were due at the end of the week, but now we have to produce it through zoom and it’s my worst nightmare,” sophomore Amber Sharma said.