Remember how your parents used to yell at you for watching TV for too long? While they were afraid that all that extra screen time would affect your eyes badly, researchers have now found even more alarming reasons for why extra screen time should be avoided. And now that technology has increased tenfold, it has become all the more easy for young children to get access to screens in the form of smartphones or tablets. However, researchers warn that parents need to pay attention to how much screen time their preschoolers are getting.
They conducted a study which found that preschoolers below the age of five shouldn't be getting more than two hours of screen-time. Excessive screen time in preschoolers has been associated with inattention. It's already been found that raised levels of screen time have been associated with cardiovascular diseases, poor sleep, unhealthy dietary patterns and obesity. Now, inattention is just the latest unhealthy factor to be added to this list.
For the study, researchers collected data from parents whose children spent most of their screen time using mobile phones or gaming. It was found that children aged five years spent around 1.4 hours per day glued to a screen whereas children aged three spent 1.5 hours. These results were then compared with children who had less than 30 minutes worth of screen time per day. It was found that 13.7% of those children who spent more than two hours watching something on-screens were five times more likely to have significant externalising problems and were 5.9 times more likely to have inattention issues.
In fact, these children even had a 7.7 times increased risk of having an attention deficit or hyperactivity disorder. “How much is too much screen time for children? We found that children with more than 2 hours of screen time per day had significantly more behaviour problems at five years of age. Interestingly, the more time children spent doing organized sports, the less likely they were to exhibit behavioural problems,” the researchers said. “Taken together, our results support an active beginning for children with screen time replaced by more organized sports,” they concluded. Stay tuned for more updates.
