While New Zealand hunts for productivity gains, a generation's attention is quietly shrinking
Sunday, 21 June 2026
The workers New Zealand is raising right now may struggle to focus, research suggests, with Ministry of Health data showing children are on screens more and sleeping less. Amelia Wade reports.
Guo gave her daughter a phone when she was three or four years old, because her dad travelled a lot for work and she wanted to make sure they could stay connected.
Then, when the family emigrated to Auckland from China, her daughter felt isolated and struggled to fit in with her Kiwi classmates, who didn't share the same jokes or culture. The phone helped her stay in touch with her friends back home.
But Guo noticed her daughter's screen time creeping up. What had been a few hours a week became a few hours a day. She liked sharing her paintings on social media, and it was a place she could socialise with her friends. Guo began to feel like it was getting out of hand.
'Initially I just talked with her and had some time limits that she couldn't use [the phone], but I found she lied to me and used it during midnight,' Guo said.
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She turned to a parenting support programme, Triple P, for help which encouraged her to lean into the relationship rather than just the rules. She made sure they would talk for hours a day, so Guo could understand her daughter’s feelings and frustrations.
And they set boundaries, like only using her laptop for school-work and her hobby of writing during the week. Then at the weekends she is allowed some recreation time.
Guo also learned to look after her own energy, so she had something left for quality time with her daughter, now 14, after work.
“She's willing to talk with me to express her emotions, even just getting angry. So, I think that's a good thing.”
It is the kind of negotiation playing out in homes across New Zealand. And new analysis of government health data suggests the stakes are higher than most parents realise - not just for individual families, but for the cognitive development of an entire generation.
New Zealand's pre-teens are spending nearly double the recommended time on screens each day, and are sleeping less than they should.
International research is only now beginning to map what that combination may be doing to developing brains - specifically to executive function, the set of cognitive skills that governs attention, impulse control, and emotional regulation and which underpins our ability to be effective workers and adults.
One researcher who has reviewed more than 4500 studies on the relationship between screen use and children's cognitive development calls the picture emerging from that research 'scary'.
Dr Claire Reid, of the University of Auckland, is worried about what the futures look like for these children whose brains aren’t developing properly - and whether it will mean a deepening of our productivity crisis.
“From my corporate career before this, I saw how hard young people coming into the office found it to focus and not be distracted by social media.
“The average is about five hours a day on phones — that's lost productivity, time gone.”
The local data tells its own story, drawn from eight years of Ministry of Health surveys that have largely sat unnoticed in spreadsheets.
Two indicators, sleep and screentime, have been tracked separately across six rolling averages and are both moving in the same direction since 2017 - neither has reversed.
The New Zealand Health Survey's most recent data, covering the period 2022/23 to 2024/25, shows that only 30.6% of children aged six months to 14 years meet the recommended limit of two hours of recreational screen time per day.
The guideline, set by the Ministry of Health, recommends no screen time for under-twos, less than one hour a day for two to five year olds, and less than two hours a day for five to 17 year olds.
Among 10 to 14 year olds, the figure is far worse with just 18.8% meeting the guidelines. That age group averages 3.5 hours of daily screen time - nearly double the recommended limit.
The data shows a worsening picture - when the study first recorded screen time adherence in 2017/18, 32.6% of children were within guidelines.
At the same time, young people are sleeping less and less.
In 2017/18, 16.5% of children were getting insufficient sleep for their age but by 2024/25, that figure had risen to 21%.
Among 10 to 14 year-olds, more than one in four - 26.5% - now regularly gets too little sleep, up from 19.9% six years earlier. Their average nightly sleep sits at nine hours, at the very bottom of the recommended range.
The two datasets cannot show a causal link between rising screen time and falling sleep, because they do not track the same children over time. What they can show is that both problems are getting worse, in parallel, across the entire period the ministry has measured them.
The ministry's data also shows the load is not falling evenly because children in the most deprived areas of New Zealand are nearly twice as likely to be short sleepers as those in the least deprived, with a short sleep rate of 29.6% against 15.3%.
Those same children are significantly less likely to meet screen time guidelines: 24.1%, compared with 35.9% for children in the least deprived areas.
That pattern didn't surprise Jackie Riach, who leads the Triple P parenting programme in New Zealand.
'If you don't have money, your kid isn't going to ballet, tennis, and music lessons,' she said.
And Riach was careful not to frame the gap as a parenting failure.
'I certainly wouldn't be saying it's due to bad parenting in those areas,' she said. 'It may be less access to resources, less awareness, fewer services.'
Tony Laulu, who runs Digital Discipline, a programme working with schools and families on managing screen time, sees the same pattern but says it is not a problem unique to low-income communities.
While most of his work is in South Auckland, he also runs workshops elsewhere in the country, including with predominantly European and Asian families in wealthier areas.
'The theme is consistent across everybody,' he said.
He recounted a conversation with a school principal: '[They] told me, and I'm putting this nicely, that five-year-olds are coming in dumber every year.'
He’s growing increasingly concerned about what he’s seeing.
“I have a niece who has an American twang to how she talks - she's growing up here, but it's because of the amount of American content she's consumed.”
Laulu started Digital Discipline after growing frustrated with his own scrolling habits and how they were affecting his family. An optimist, Laulu hopes there’s still a small window of opportunity to do preventative work, but he feels like that window is closing quickly.
“I think the ambulance is more than halfway down the hill now. I wouldn't say it's all the way down, and I still hold onto hope that there can be a revival of just being human.”
A growing body of research shows how screen time is affecting young people’s developing brains; explaining what that combination of screen exposure and sleep loss might mean.
Reid, working with colleagues at the University of Auckland, screened more than 4500 international studies down to 58 that tracked children's screen use and executive function over time.
'It covers areas like your attention - it's your ability to listen to a teacher's instructions in class, and then remember the instructions, and then follow them, and plan and organise yourself to complete your work, and focus on your work so that you can finish it.'
It is also directly tied to outcomes well beyond the classroom, she said.
'It's related to a lot of life outcomes, such as academic success, but also career success, social success,” Reid said.
“It's also been shown to be that higher executive function as a buffer against anxiety and depression… and you tend to be wealthier if you have better executive function.'
Among the most alarming findings in Reid's review came from neuroimaging.
Eight of the 58 studies scanned children's brains, some from as young as 12 months old, and followed them for years. Children with higher screen use at a young age, over time, ended up with a smaller prefrontal cortex - the brain region responsible for executive function.
'It means that we're going to have children [become adults] who will have no attention, who have no impulse control, who have poor social awareness,' Reid said.
'I think it's really quite scary.'
Before she became an academic, Reid worked in business where she saw firsthand how many young people entering the workforce struggled with attention.
She is careful to separate that observation from her formal research findings.
'This is not from the scientists, but from observation,' she said. 'I really do wonder how much of that is linked.'
Asked directly about New Zealand's future, including its productivity if our next wave of adults are struggling with attention and impulses, she said: 'I am very concerned if we don't make changes.'
What families can do
Riach said screens are now the single most common issue raised by the parents who come to Triple P for support, and the concerns span a wide range.
'There's a whole range - from the toddler tantrum every time you take the iPad off him, right up to the intermediate age with heavy demand for social media access, right up to where they're getting into territory that's concerning,' she said.
'So it's just massive.'
Her strongest advice is that prevention is far easier than correction and recommends families set clear boundaries early, like when devices can be used, what children can watch or engage with, and for how long, rather than trying to claw back access once habits are entrenched.
Riach is concerned New Zealand is falling behind other countries that have moved more decisively on social media - this week the UK announced a ban on social media for under 16s, which will come into effect next year - and device regulation, and wants to see more government-backed education for parents who feel they are up against the resources of major technology companies.
The guidance she gives families comes down to the same principles that underpin good parenting more broadly, applied to a new problem
'Good, solid parenting guidance, with nuance added for screen-specific situations,' she said.
For Guo, that has meant staying close to her daughter rather than relying on rules alone.
She still pushes back sometimes, gets frustrated by the boundaries and they have fights. But she is talking and for now, that is what her mother is holding onto.