Children spending too much time on screens: Study

Children are spending too much time watching television or using computers and mobile devices, according to a study which suggests that kids of first-time mothers, and those in home-based childcare log most screen time.

Children's average daily time spent on screens increased from 53 minutes at age 12 months to more than 150 minutes at 3 years, according to the study published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics. The researchers noted that by age 8, children were more likely to log the highest amount of screen time if they had been in home-based childcare or were born to first-time mothers. "Our results indicate that screen habits begin early," said study's senior author Edwina Yeung, from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the US. "This finding suggests that interventions to reduce screen time could have a better chance of success if introduced early," Yeung said in a statement.

The researchers, including those from the University at Albany and the New York University Langone Medical Center, analysed data from the Upstate KIDS Study, originally undertaken to follow the development of children conceived after infertility treatments and born from 2008 to 2010. Mothers of nearly 4,000 children who took part in the study responded to questions on their kids' media habits when they were 12, 18, 24, 30, and 36 months of age.

They also responded to similar questions when the children were 7 and 8 years old. The study compiled additional demographic information on the mothers and children from birth records and other surveys. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends avoiding digital media exposure for children under 18 months of age, introducing children 18 to 24 months of age to screen media slowly, and limiting screen time to an hour a day for children from 2 to 5 years of age, the researchers said. In the current study, the researchers found that 87 per cent of the children had screen time exceeding these recommendations.

However, while screen time increased throughout toddlerhood, by age 7 and 8, screen time fell to under 1.5 hours per day. The researchers believe this decrease relates to time consumed by school-related activities. The researchers classified the children into two groups based on how much their average daily screen time increased from age 1 to age 3. The first group, 73 per cent of the total, had the lowest increase, from an average of nearly 51 minutes a day to nearly an hour and 47 minutes a day.