Is screen time to blame when teenagers lose interest in school? A new study from rural Indonesia suggests that the bigger issue may be how young people are coping emotionally, rather than how many hours they spend looking at screens.
The research, published in The Open Psychology Journal, was led by Dr Fransisca Iriani Roesmala Dewi of the Faculty of Psychology at Universitas Tarumanagara in Jakarta. The team studied 92 pairs of adolescents and their caregivers at a public junior high school in Salatiga, Central Java, which the authors describe as a rural educational setting. The young people were aged 12–16.
The authors note that adolescents in rural regions face their own psychosocial challenges, shaped by family dynamics and digital exposure. They say rural settings have been underrepresented in research on how screen time, emotional difficulties, and motivation fit together.
Both teenagers and caregivers completed established questionnaires. These covered emotional and behavioural difficulties, psychological distress, well-being, screen time, parenting, and how motivated the young people felt about their schoolwork.
The clearest result was that emotional and behavioural difficulties were the main factor linked to academic motivation. On their own, they accounted for 40.7% of the variation in how motivated the teenagers were.
Psychological distress was linked to more difficulties, while higher well-being was linked to fewer. In contrast, the links between screen time and the outcomes were weaker and less consistent, suggesting that the number of hours online told the researchers relatively little.
The team also looked for indirect pathways, such as screen time affecting motivation through emotional problems. These effects were limited, and the authors say they should be treated as exploratory given the modest sample.
The authors argue that the results fit with theories that stress both distress and well-being as parts of mental health. They suggest that the effect of screen use may depend on context, such as what young people are doing online and why, rather than simply how long they spend doing it.
The study has clear limits. It was cross-sectional, so it captures one moment in time and cannot show cause and effect, and 92 families from a single school is a small sample. One of the measures, covering social connectedness, also showed relatively low reliability, so the authors urge caution over findings involving it.
Even so, the findings offer a useful message for families and schools. Instead of focusing only on cutting screen time, the authors recommend strengthening social connection and supporting caregivers’ own mental health as ways to help rural teenagers stay engaged with their education.
For parents worried about a disengaged teenager, the research suggests that asking how a young person is feeling may be a better starting point than taking away the phone.
