During the pandemic, children found solace in online communities whether they were gaming, sharing content, or just chatting with their friends. Two new studies by JAMA Pediatrics find that screen time for toddlers has increased exponentially over the last two years.
About 4,000 mothers in upstate New York were asked the level of screen use by their children at 12, 18, 24, 30 and 36 months of age. These results were then compared with the screen use of 7 and 8-year-olds.
Children 12 months to three years are behind a screen three times more, from an average of 53 minutes to more than 150 minutes daily. The study showed that children of first-time mothers and children who were in home-based childcare logged the highest amount of screen time by elementary school.
“Our results indicate that screen habits begin early,” senior author Edwina Yeung, an investigator at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development said in a statement. “This finding suggests that interventions to reduce screen time could have a better chance of success if introduced early.”
The American Academy of Pediatrics says that children between 18 months and 5 years of age should only be exposed to one hour a day, preferably with parents or caregivers who interact with them about the content on the screen.
More than 79% of children aged 2, and nearly 95% of children aged 3 in Canada were exceeding the WHO guidance of no more than one hour of high-quality programming daily.
The WHO recommends that children under the age of 1 do not use screens at all. It is recommended that parents read and tell their children stories rather than sit them behind a screen. Children between the ages of 1 and 4 should only get about an hour of screen time daily.
