RUSKIN - The SouthShore Chamber of Commerce's Educational Partnership Committee will present Screenagers: Growing Up in the Digital Age, at 6 p.m. on Tuesday (May 15) at the Ruskin Firehouse Cultural Center, 101 1st Ave.
The documentary chronicles what producers call "the biggest parenting issue of our time."
Teenagers spend an average of 6 1/2 hours each day in front of screens playing video games, texting on smartphones and searching the Internet on iPads.
Parents continue to wonder at what age children should get a phone, and the hypocrisy of telling kids to give up hours of playing Fortnite while they're spending 10 hours binge-watching a series on Netflix.
The latest initiative from the team behind the award-winning documentary is "Away For The Day" (AFTD), a movement to help transform middle schools into cell phone-free spaces. Ruston said in a release that through thousands of Screenagers' film events, she's heard from parents, teachers, and principals that cell phones are creating a huge distraction in middle schools and people want change.
Delaney Ruston, a physician and filmmaker who created Screenagers, approaches screen time issues from an evidence-based perspective. When she discovered there were no studies on cell phone policies in schools, she and the Screenagers team decided to conduct a national survey on cell phone policies in schools and parental preferences.
She learned that 55 percent of middle schools let students carry phones all day yet 82 percent of parents do not want their kids using phones at school.
