It’s obvious that Netflix has completely taken over the 21st century and it is not going anywhere anytime soon. Teens worldwide have been spending more time binge-watching Netflix than studying for school, which has shown drastic effects in the grades of the children. Is Netflix to blame for the decrease of school performance?

According to Venturebeat, more than one billion hours are spent watching Netflix every month and approximately 43% of those Netflix users are teenagers. As a result of this phenomenon, grades are drastically dropping for young children and teenagers and everything seems to be pointing back at Netflix as the answer.

Countless amounts of research have been conducted and all prove the same thing: children who go to bed later than 11:30 p.m. on school nights have lower GPAs than those who go to bed earlier. Venturebeat claims that roughly 84% of Netflix users receive less than six hours of sleep on weekdays, due to binge-watching.

With that being said, it seems clear that students are simply not getting enough sleep, because they are up too late watching Netflix. The result of this is students showing up to school exhausted, which will greatly affect their physical, psychological, and emotional performance throughout the duration of the school day.

Sleep deprivation can destroy thinking and learning during school by damaging cognitive processes. Lack of sleep can impair attention, alertness, concentration, reasoning, and problem solving, as well as forcing students to spend a far greater amount of time to learn that they would usually need.

Studies have also shown that students are more susceptible to emotional issues within families when they lose sleep and spend more time in front of a screen. Excessive binge-watching of any screen severely affects the emotional stability of children especially, because they become too invested in the false relationships on T.V. Because of this, children believe that their own relationships need to exactly match the relationships in real life.

School is stressful enough as it is, but students are even more likely to fail if they are suffering from emotional distress caused by Netflix. The damaging effects that Netflix has on students will not only come into play at school, but they could carry those disabilities with them for the rest of their lives.

All in all, students should seriously take into consideration how their Netflix usage influences their performance at school. Because this generation is often called the “digital age,” people have got to more proactive with their time and stay focused on school.

So maybe instead of watching a full season of Netflix every night, limit yourself to an episode or two and use some of that time to study or maybe even crack open that dusty book on the shelf.

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