Running Head: Screen Time in Young Children
Screen Time in Young Children
Sarah Haidar
Florida Gulf Coast University
Screen Time in Young Children
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Whether you are shopping at a grocery store or sitting at a restaurant, screens are present
and used everywhere. Before the widespread use of cell-phones, our screen usage was limited to
televisions and computers. Now, we have access to screens constantly with our smartphones,
tablets, Chromebooks, etc and while they have provided so much access to information and
entertainment, there have been particular issues that have arisen, especially in children. This
essay will define and give a brief history of screen time, examine the many positive and negative
effects that screen time has on childhood development specifically between birth and 7 years old
and what parents can do about it all.
Screen time is “defined as the viewing or use of anything with a screen, including TV,
DVDs, video games and computers”(Kaneshiro, 2019). An adult spends an average of 7 hours a
day interacting with a screen while children under the age of 7 spend about 5 hours (Vittrup,
Snider, Rose, & Rippy, 2014). With technology having entered our workplaces and schools, it is
understandable that adults spend much of their days looking at a screen and while it does pose a
risk to our health, the effect that screen time is having on childhood development is much more
alarming. A study done in Australia goes further to define and divide screen time into the
categories active and passive in order to understand the effects that screen time has on children.
Active screen time “involves cognitively or physically engaging in screen-based activities, such
as playing video games or completing homework on a computer” while passive screen time
“involves sedentary screen-based activities and/or passively receiving screen-based information,
such as watching TV or a DVD”(Sweetser, Johnson, Ozdowska, & Wyeth, 2012). This study
stressed that it is important to not make the assumption that all screen time activities are
equivalent and that certain activities can help stimulate a child’s cognitive development. A
Screen Sense article expands on how young children learn and retain content while also claiming
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that there is “no research showing that when children under 2 years old use devices
independently, it enhances their development” (Lerner & Barr, 2014). There is a great deal of
research on how consuming age-appropriate and interactive content can greatly benefit children,
especially when it is a shared learning experience with an adult. In fact, a large focus of this
article and many others was placed on sharing the importance of parent involvement in screen
use.
While the type of content that children are consuming is a hot topic of discussion among
all of the studies, the overwhelming concern regards the amount of time that children spend in
front of screens, especially unsupervised time. The American Academy of Pediatrics
recommends that children under the age of 18 months should have no screen time other than
video-chatting because it helps reinforce interactions with them. Between the ages of 2-5, it is
recommended that children only have one hour of screen time that consists of high-quality
educational programming and is viewed alongside a guardian and after the age of 6, the
guidelines become much looser with the main recommendation being to set sacred screen-free
times at meals and bedtime (AAP, 2016). Research shows that “on average, children from birth
to 23 months old are watching 55 minutes of TV a day, and 2- to 4-year olds are watching 90
minutes a day”(Lerner & Barr, 2014). According to another study from the Journal of Early
Childhood Research, they found the average amount of time that is spent among children
between ages 2-7 was roughly 5 hrs, which included television, computer time, tech toys and
video games. An overwhelming majority of this time (~3 hrs) is spent watching television.
Something important to note about this study is that this data was collected from the parents’
perspectives and that they were not asked to report about how much of that screen time was
supervised. However, they were asked which devices the children had private access to and it
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was found that educational tech toys were most likely to be used privately. It was also found that
“parents’ total media use was positively correlated with their children’s”(Lerner & Barr, 2014),
and that age and education level did not seem to influence the total amount of screen time. This
study also examined the parental perception of their children’s technology knowledge and found
that parents overwhelmingly underestimated how proficient their children were with certain
technologies and overestimated how much they knew with tools like video cameras and DVR.
Parents were also surveyed about their opinions regarding screen time and many expressed that
“children today naturally understand how to use computers and related technologies at an early
age”(Vittrup, Snider, Rose, & Rippy, 2014). This perception that parents have about their
children’s competence with technology may play into why many feel that they can handle
