Giving Compass' Take:

• Naomi Schaefer Riley argues that the most significant digital divide in the U.S. is between children with limited screen time and those with unlimited screen time. 

• How can philanthropy educate parents about the dangers of excessive screen time and help them access alternatives for their children? How do factors like the cost of childcare play into this divide? 

• Learn about Screen-Free Week. 

A group of former Facebook and Google employees last week began a campaign to change the tech companies they had a hand in creating. The initiative, called Truth About Tech, aims to push these companies to make their products less addictive for children — and it’s a good start.

But there’s more to the problem. If you think middle-class children are being harmed by too much screen time, just consider how much greater the damage is to minority and disadvantaged kids, who spend much more time in front of screens. According to a 2011 study by researchers at Northwestern University, minority children watch 50 percent more TV than their white peers, and they use computers for up to one and a half hours longer each day.

Screen time has a negative effect on children’s ability to understand nonverbal emotional cues; it is linked to higher rates of mental illness, including depression; and it heightens the risk for obesity. Every additional hour of TV increased a child’s odds of attention problems by about 10 percent.

Today, thanks to lucrative contracts with school districts, tech companies are happy to bring screens into the classroom and send them home. But there is little evidence that such programs are helping students.

But no one is telling poorer parents about the dangers of screen time. Make no mistake: The real digital divide in this country is not between children who have access to the internet and those who don’t. It’s between children whose parents know that they have to restrict screen time and those whose parents have been sold a bill of goods by schools and politicians that more screens are a key to success.

Read the full article about the digital divide by Naomi Schaefer Riley at AEI.