Screen time associated with developmental delays in toddlers

Key takeaways:

• Screen time at an early age was associated with delays in communication and problem-solving skills.
• More than 4% of children aged 1 year spent more than 4 hours per day on screens.

Increased screen time at age 1 year was associated with developmental delays in communication and problem-solving at ages 2 and 4 years, according to study findings reported in JAMA Pediatrics.

Screen time recently topped a poll of parental concerns about children’s health.

“The recent proliferation of digital devices has focused attention on the link between screen time and child development,” Taku Obara, PhD, associate professor at Tohoku University and Tohuku Medical Megabank Organization in Sendai, Japan, told Healio. “However, it was not known which domains of development screen time is associated with.”

Obara and colleagues studied data from the Tohoku Medical Megabank Project Birth and Three-Generation (TMM BirThree) cohort study, which included 7,097 mother-child pairs. Each child’s screen time exposure was measured using parental questionnaires that covered use of televisions, video games, tablets, mobile phones and other electronic devices with visual displays.

They separated screen time exposure at 1 year of age into four categories: less than 1 hour per day, 1 to less than 2 hours per day, 2 to less than 4 hours per day or more than 4 hours per day. They assessed each child’s development in the domains of communication, gross motor, fine motor, problem-solving and personal and social skills at 2 and 4 years of age using a Japanese questionnaire.

In the study group, 48.5% of children were reported to spend less than 1 hour per day on screens, 29.5% 1 to less than 2 hours per day, 17.9% 2 to less than 4 hours per day and 4.1% 4 or more hours per day.

Obara and colleagues found that screen time was associated with a higher odds of developmental delay at age 2 years in the communication, fine motor, problem-solving and personal and social skills domains.

Specifically, communications delays were 61% more likely for children who had 1 to 2 hours of screen time, twice as likely for children with 2 to 4 hours of screen time, and almost five-fold higher for children with more than 4 hours of screen time compared with participants who averaged less than 1 hour of screen time at age 1 year.

Fine motor delays were 74% more likely, and problem-solving and personal and social skill delays were more than twice as likely in the highest-use groups, according to the findings.

“The results of our study add the evidence that screen time was associated with development in the communication and problem-solving domains, not all domains,” Obara said. “We would like to propose that future studies examining the relationship between screen time and development in children need to consider each developmental domain separately.”

Obara did caution that the results of the study revealed an association between screen time and developmental delays, not causation, and that the results of the study do not constitute a recommendation for restricting screen time.

“In this study, greater screen time was associated with developmental delay,” Obara said. “A previous meta-analysis showed that greater screen time was associated with decreased language skills, whereas screen time spent on educational programs was associated with increased language skills. So, because screen time may have an educational aspect depending on the programs watched on electronic devices, a distinction between educational and noneducational aspects of screen time may also need to be considered when we discuss the association between screen time and development.”