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Too much screen time tied to behavioral issues in preschoolers
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In a large birth cohort study, researchers found that preschool-aged children who had 2 hours of screen time per day were at increased risk for clinically significant externalizing problems, inattention problems and ADHD.
Research is lacking on the associations between screen-time exposure and behavioral development in preschool-aged children and most studies have focused on school-aged children, according to the study published in PLOS One.
Therefore, researchers examined the link between screen time and behavior among 2,322 preschoolers using data from the Canadian Healthy Infant Longitudinal Development (CHILD) study.
Parents completed the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) — which measures clinically significant externalizing problems (primary outcome) internalizing problems, sleep issues, ADHD and behavioral problems (secondary outcomes) — when children were aged 5 years and reported their child’s total screen time, including gaming and mobile devices. Screen time was measured at ages 3 and 5 years.
On average, children aged 5 years had screen time of 1.4 hours per day (95% CI, 1.4-1.5) and those aged 3 years had screen time of 1.5 hours per day (95% CI, 1.5-1.6). Overall, 42% of children aged 3 years exceeded the recommended threshold of 1 hour per day of screen time and 13% of children aged 5 years exceeded the 2 hour per day threshold, according to a related press release.
Compared with preschoolers with less than 30 minutes per day of screen time, those who watched more than 2 hours each day were at five times higher risk for reporting clinically significant externalizing problems (95% CI, 1-25) and were 5.9 times more likely to report clinically significant inattention problems (95% CI, 1.6-21.5), according to the results. Children aged 5 years exposed to more than 2 hours of screen time each day were also at 1.8-point higher risk for internalizing behavior issues (95% CI, 0.6-3.1).
Children who had more than 2 hours of screen time per day were at 7.7-fold higher risk for meeting criteria for ADHD (95% CI, 1.6-38.1).
In addition, children with more screen time had shorter sleep times, Piush Mandhane, MD, PhD, FRCPC, study author and associate professor and divisional director of pediatric respiratory medicine, University of Alberta, told Healio Psychiatry.
“We suggest that parents should limit their child’s screen-time to no more than 2 hours per day and ideally less than 30 minutes per day,” Mandhane said.
“The results have significant implications for parents and clinicians,” he continued. “Our study highlights the need for parents to help their children develop a healthy relationship with screens early — as young as 3 to 5 years of age. Built-in apps can help parents limit screen time in their child and help avoid confrontations in doing so. Both screen time and sleep time are important considerations for clinicians to consider when seeing young children with behavior problems.” – by Savannah Demko
Disclosure: The authors report no relevant financial disclosures.