New Study Indicates Recreational Screen Time For Kids Makes Very Little Difference

from the leave-them-kids-alone dept

When I became a parent nearly seven years ago, I tasked myself with reading up on what to expect and how to be a good parent. Among many more important things, one prominent point of reading that led to many discussions in our household was screen time for children. And, as you might expect, that conversation has been ongoing to date. There are lots of theories out there about just how much screen time kids should get at certain ages, but the unifying force behind those theories typically is that it should be relatively limited. Some nations have even gotten into the game of forcing screen time limitations on children, or at least many have gone that route for targeted types of screen time, such as video games.

But what if I told you that all that worrying done by parents, all the reading on the topic, and all of the effort put into it by governments is basically for nothing? Well, that seems to be the main conclusion reached by a new study that finds that the impact of recreational screen time on children is statistically negligible.

Even when kids spend five hours a day on screen – whether computers, television or text – it doesn’t appear to be harmful. That’s what my colleagues and I at the University of Colorado Boulder discovered after analyzing data taken from nearly 12,000 participants in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study – the largest long-term study of its kind ever in the U.S.

The participants included children between the ages of 9 to 10, from diverse backgrounds, income levels and ethnicities. We investigated how screen time was linked to some of the most critical aspects of their lives: sleep, mental health, behavior and friendships.

Now, there are a ton of caveats to all of this. The most important of those include that this is a correlative study, not one looking for causality. It's also a narrow age group being studied, even as the study has an impressive sample size. And there were also both positive and negative correlations uncovered.

For instance, increased screen time in the sample group correlated to stronger interpersonal relationships with peers. That would be the opposite of the old parental dogma that suggests that looking at a screen means you aren't going to have any friends. On the other hand, increasing screen time on the far end of the spectrum did correlate with declining sleep and academic performance. So what does this mean? Screen time is good? Screen time is bad?

Perhaps neither one: When looking at the strength of the correlations, we see only very modest associations. That is, any association between screen time and the various outcomes, whether good or bad, is so small it’s unlikely to be important at a clinical level.

Some kids scored lower than others on these outcomes, some scored higher; screen time only explained 2% of the difference in the scores. This suggests the differences are explained by many variables, not just screen time. It’s a very small piece of a much larger picture.

Which should mostly tell us what we already know: outcomes in children are nuanced and complicated, involving many factors, and every child's needs are different. What isn't true, based on this study, is that parents should be given blanket recommendations on the amount of screen time their children should be allowed to have.

And, because, again, these are correlative studies, even correlation found doesn't equate to screen time being a root cause.

For example, we found that adolescents who spend more time on screens may display more symptoms of aggression. But we can’t say screen time causes the symptoms; instead, maybe more aggressive children are given screen devices as an attempt to distract them and calm their behavior.

There are so many boogeymen set up for parents to jump at these days. At the very least, it's probably time to make it so that reasonable spectrums of screen time for children are not on the list.

Filed Under: children, screen time, studies

Taiwan Nannies Rule: Parents Can't Decide How Much Time Their Kids Spend With Electronics

from the mama-government dept

The nanny-state arms race marches on, apparently. Whereas the previous intersection of overbearing government and technology has resulted in politicians attempting to ban the use of headphones while walking across the street, governments introducing all manner of silly policies in the name of "protecting the children", and even municipalities attempting to run psy-ops on citizens to keep them from smoking, Taiwan appears to be taking an even more direct approach with plans to fine the parents of children the government has deemed spend too much time with electronics.

Under rules passed last Friday by Taiwanese politicians, children under the age of two should be completely banned from using electronic devices, Xinhua, China's official news agency reported. Meanwhile under-18s should not be allowed to "constantly use electronic products for a period of time that is not reasonable". It means electronic products are now listed alongside cigarettes and alcohol as potentially dangerous vices.

And you can see their point, assuming you're a crazy person. Because electronics are tools primarily of communication and productivity, even if they're also used for entertainment, and government intrusion on young people's ability to communicate, learn, and be entertained is so far removed from alcohol and tobacco that one wonders how the argument was made with a straight face to begin with. The prospective "too much time" part of this legal equation has yet to be ironed out, but the brainchild for the law is, shall we say, more than slightly aggressive on the topic.

The new regulation is the brainchild of Lu Shiow-yen, a Taiwanese member of parliament who said his intention was to protect young people by stopping them using electronic devices for more than 30 minutes at a time. Parents who break the rules can be hit with fines of up to about £1,000 although it remains unclear how authorities will determine what amount of time is unreasonable.

There's a million reasons why this is stupid, but I'll boil it down to one specific reason: baseball. Baseball is huge in Taiwan. Baseball is enjoyed primarily on television and streaming electronic devices. And baseball, for all its wonderful aspects, takes roughly as much time as it takes for a mountain to form in the Nebraska prairie. Thirty-minute stretches of time as a limit effectively outlaws youngsters watching baseball. Put in that context, and really any other context, these sorts of artificial limitations on the electronics that dominate our lives (in a good way) are ludicrous.

Expect either the backlash here to be huge, or the law to go largely ignored. Either way, this is a political non-starter.

Filed Under: children, devices, electronics, kids, nanny state, parents, screen time, taiwan

DailyDirt: Parenting With Technology

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Recently, the LA school district has had some problems with its adoption of iPads into its classrooms. Kids will be kids, and some of them figured out how to use their school-issued iPads for unsanctioned activities like watching movies, playing games and wasting time on Facebook. Clearly, there's a bit of a learning curve for using technology as an educational tool as educators try to figure out how to lock down the devices and keep kids focused on using them solely for school-related work. Many parents with young kids want to encourage their children to use all kinds of technology, but the advice and recommendations from various experts can be a bit conflicting or almost useless. Here are just a few links on kids and screen time.

• According to recent surveys, technology is not at the top of the list of concerns that parents have about their newborn to 8yo kids. Parents who have grown up using technology are flexible in their own adoption of technology as a parenting tool -- and not all of them use iPads as toddler pacifiers/babysitters. [url]
• Some prestigious pre-schools are handing iPads to 18mo kids, but not every parent agrees that barely-potty-trained kids should be interacting with a touchscreen instead of other humans. Also, you don't want to touch that iPad after a kid who's not potty trained has used it. [url]
• Plenty of folks are discussing the effects of screen time on kids. Apparently, some are making a distinction between "active" and "passive" screen time -- but it's still not clear if educational apps are actually educational. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: babysitter, computers, education, ipads, kids, mental development, parenting, pre-school, school, screen time, tools, trend