Drop the screen, go outside: report
A report released on Cyber Monday by Nature Canada is telling parents to give their kids “more green time (and) less screen time.”
Report author Jill Sturdy studied existing research on screen time, which showed that “when our parents told us to go play outside, they were actually giving us great health advice.”
Sturdy, who is a mother herself, looked at both the physical and mental-health effects of sitting indoors in front of a screen.
“When I put it all together and saw the story the research was telling, I was shocked,” she said. “We all know kids are spending too much time with screens, but the impact of that is much greater than I imagined.”
Those impacts include the physical effects of being sedentary and sitting for too long, as well as mental-health issues and interrupted sleep patterns.
Sturdy found 55 per cent of children aged five to 17 were exceeding the guidelines for screen time. The Canadian Paediatric Society recommends no screen time for kids under two, one hour maximum for kids between two and four, and two hours maximum for children five to 17.
But the author was also encouraged by the findings of studies that said spending time in nature and being active outdoors was highly beneficial to children’s physical and mental health, helping to improve their resiliency, academic performance and social skills.
“I think intuitively we all know it’s good for us,” she said. “It really only takes a few changes, a little reset, to build more time outside into our routines. It shouldn’t be life-shattering.”
Sturdy encouraged parents to model behaviour to kids — “we need to put our phones down,” she said.
She also advocated making a schedule to limit when kids can and cannot have access to screens. Parents can also create “screenfree zones” — for example, not allowing kids to have devices at the dinner table or in their bedrooms at night.
Getting into nature can be as simple as “walking out your door,” she said. “After dinner, go for a 10-minute walk. Every Saturday, discover a new trail.”
Sturdy pointed to a B.C. program called NatureKidsBC, which runs family nature clubs.
“The good news here is that the solution to too much screen time is right outside our front doors,” she said.