The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
SCREENTIME
As the pandemic continues to drag on, are your kids getting too much screen time with their laptops, tablets, phones and other devices? Or are you worrying about nothing? The answer depends on whom you’re listening to.
Youngsters get too much screen time
A study published in October by the Journal of American Medicine/pediatrics said that screen time for some children had doubled from 3.8 to 7.7 hours a day. And this isn’t even counting time spent in virtual schoolrooms.
The American Academy of Pediatrics is one of the groups sounding the alarm on kids spending too much time in front of electronic media during the pandemic. The academy discourages any media use by children younger than 2 and recommends limiting screen time of older children — including teens and adults — to two hours a day.
The academy says too much screen time is linked to obesity, irregular sleep patterns, emotional problems, poor school performance and violent behavior.
A survey released last April — just as the pandemic was hitting its stride — by child advocacy group Parentstogether suggested nearly half of kids had increased their screen time 500% since before the pandemic and that 85% of parents surveyed worry about the effects that apps, games and social media are having on their children.
We worry too much about screen time
Plenty of academic studies suggest otherwise. For example, a study of 11,875 9and 10-year-olds published in the PLOS ONE scientific journal in September suggested increased screen time is unlikely to be directly harmful to 9- and 10-year-old children. “That the screen-time panic persists even in the face of such questionable evidence isn’t surprising,” wrote Kiera Butler in Mother Jones last June. “Parents’ anxiety about screens follows an age-old pattern of overreaction to new technologies.”
Among the examples Butler cited:
■ “In ancient Greece ... philosophers claimed that the act of writing would make young people more rebellious.”
■ “In the 18th century, parents worried that their children would become addicted to reading.”
■ “A 1929 New York Times article warned that constant exposure to fast-paced jazz would cause illness by tiring children out.”
■ “Some parents in the ’40s fretted that they wouldn’t be able to control their children’s exposure to radio because, as one child-rearing magazine put it, ‘it comes into our very homes and captures our children before our very eyes.’”