Dial back on kids’ digital screen time
Go into any mall, walk down a busy urban street or sit in a casual restaurant, and one of the most common sights is a very young child playing with a phone or other digital device. The great electronic babysitter has become the behavior management tool of choice for many parents.
That’s despite the fact that the American Academy of Pediatrics says there should be no screen time at all for children younger than 18 to 24 months, except for video chatting, and kids 2 to 5 should be limited to 60 minutes or less a day.
One 2022 study published in JAMA Pediatrics found that, for boys there is an association between screen time exposure as a 1-yearold and diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder at age 3. If screen time totaled two to four hours daily, their risk more than tripled!
Another study in the same journal has found that when parents use mobile devices to calm kids down — “Here, zone out on this!”
— they deprive children of the chance to learn emotion-regulation strategies that help them cope with frustration.
The result, they become more hyper-reactive, more frazzled by adverse situations and less able to use executive functioning to be attentive, remember instructions and juggle tasks. So next time your little one acts up, identify the cause of the upset and use nondigital distractions you can do together (games, books, changing locations) to help your child learn self-directed coping skills.
Coffee risks
Nearly 116 million American adults have high blood pressure; only a quarter of them have it under control; and half of those folks have pressure readings above 140/90. In addition, research shows that almost none of those folks are taking medication that’s been recommended to them. Uncontrolled high blood pressure can lead to heart attack, stroke, dementia, heart and kidney failure — and even cancer.
And now a study in the Journal of the American Heart Association reveals one more thing that might detonate it. Folks with blood pressure of 160/100 or higher and who drink two or more cups of coffee a day have twice the risk of death from heart disease as folks who don’t drink coffee!
So if your blood pressure is at or above 140/90 (that’s considered high — 130/80 is recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) you might want to take it easy on the morning coffee until you get your blood pressure controlled.