Wisdom Wednesdays: What you need to know about screen time and kids

New research reveals screen time could be worse for kids' development than we thought.

In this episode I discuss new research on the negative impacts of screen time on social-emotional development in young children. It highlights recommendations around limiting screen time and data showing most families don't meet these. The research found increased screen time is associated with hyperactivity, emotional problems, conduct issues, and peer problems in kids under 5. It suggests fast-paced, overstimulating content and less social interaction contribute. Lack of sleep and physical activity due to excessive screen time are also detrimental.

Timestamps:
- 0:00 Intro
- 1:15 Screen time recommendations
- 2:30 Research on screen time and child development
- 5:15 Potential reasons for negative impacts
- 6:45 Concerns around sleep and activity
- 8:15 Recommendations for parents

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:09):
Hey, everybody, welcome to another edition of Wisdom Wednesdays. Now,
if you're a parent, if you remember having little kids,
I think we'll all remember the temptation of giving it
the iPad or the iPad nanny. But it turns out
that new research shows that this could be worse for
kids than we originally thought. So first of all, let's

(00:33):
start with recommendations around screen time. The World Health Organization
and the American Academy of Pediatrics have recommended that children
under five have a maximum of one hour of screen
time per day, and children under two should not have
any screen time at all. Now, unfortunately, there's very few

(00:55):
families that are meeting these guidelines. So at twenty twenty two,
meta analysis examining sixty three studies from a whole range
of countries found that only thirty six percent of children
under five and twenty five percent of children under two
meet these recommendations. Furthermore, the researchers thought that those figures

(01:19):
were likely to be under representative, as questioners of screen
time frequently underestimate screen time due to difficulties recalling how
much they actually watched, and because screen time is often
viewed negatively, leading parents to under report to what we

(01:40):
call social desirability bias. We want to actually fit in,
and less screen time would appear in previous research to
be better for developmental health. So on one previous study,
even thirty minutes to two hours of screen time per
day had association since with poorer developmental health compared the

(02:03):
durations of less than thirty minutes. And another study, the
risk of language delay in two year olds in Korea
was forty three percent higher with one to two hours
of screen time use per day, one hundred and seventy
four percent higher with two to three hours of screen
time use, and whopping two hundred and three percent higher

(02:25):
with kids who had over three hours of screen time
use a day. So this new research actually set out
to look at the effective screen time on the social
emotional development of children under the age of five, and
it was a systematic review just published in March twenty

(02:49):
and twenty five, And they basically did it due to
the increased amount of time that kids under the age
of five spend on electronic media and they want to
actually look and see what is the impact, and they
looked at three It was a meta analysis of three
large observational studies that included over twenty six thousand kids

(03:13):
under five, and they found that higher screen time was
associated with worse overall social emotional development. So one study
was conducted in Finland and China and one was conducted
in eight European countries, so we had a pretty good
spread in this and they used questioners to assess social

(03:35):
emotional development in four different domains hyperactivity, emotional problems, conduct
problems like rule breaking behaviors, and peer problems, interactions with
other kids, and social emotional development refers to the ability
to communicate emotions and establish connections with others and it's

(03:56):
a really important part of that front door low development
in young children. And what they actually found the highlights
of this study was that more time on screens and
whether it was television or tablets, were associated with the
following a thirty nine percent higher odds of hyperactivity, potentially

(04:18):
down the track leading to an ad it's D diagnosis.
And they also found a twenty one percent higher odds
of emotional problems and higher screen time was associated with
higher odds of conduct problems and problems interacting with peers,
But it was unclear whether those bits were statistically significant

(04:40):
due to some data discrepancies in the study, and the
researchers created one study is good quality and the other
two as fur quality. So we dive into the details
of this study. It turns out that screen content is
often fast paced and includes intense audio, visual effects and stimulation,
and the researches think that these high levels of stimulation

(05:04):
could make real life feel less interesting to children in comparison,
and then potentially that contributes to any attention and even
screens being in the background can affect children as well
as background screen time decrease social interactions with caregivers in
one other study, and this could hinder child social development

(05:29):
by decreasing opportunities to communicate and to build social skills.
And another thing that's a potential issue here is that
screens can potentially display sleep or disrupt it and also
displays physical activity because they are so captivating and anybody's
ever seen a young kid with a screen knows that

(05:51):
these things are so engaging for them. And the blue
white light of screens also can worsen sleep itself by
disrupting melotone production, and adequate sleep and adequate physical activity
are hugely important for social, social emotional development and all
of this is just an increasing problem in our time. Obviously,

(06:16):
when I was a kid, we didn't have that exposure
to screens, and I get it as a parent. It's
so bloody difficult, particularly when they the kids actually love
the screen so much, and that is part of the problem,
is that they are highly addictive and they actually take
the kids away from wanting to interact with others. And

(06:38):
the other thing that was really highlighted in this is
it actually destroys their physical activity or e roads into
their physical activity. And the recommendations are are that kids
for the age of three to five are physically active
for a whopping one hundred and eighty minutes a day,
and if they're spending significant amount of time on screen,
they're going to struggle to get that. And then kids

(07:01):
of this age should be sleeping for ten to thirteen
hours a day, and that impact on sleep, as well
as the direct impacts on social and emotional development, I
think is just a shocker for their future development. It
appears it's pretty much parenting is pretty much like everything
in life. The stuff that's easy is generally not good

(07:23):
for us, and the stuff that is good for us
is often very hard to do. So that's it for
this week. Folks, catch you next time.