As families everywhere adjust to social distancing measures like closed schools and child care centers, workplaces and more, parents are grappling with questions regarding their kids’ use of technology. Rebecca Dore, an expert on children and media, offers some tips for how to make the most of screen time for kids who are cooped up at home.
Many young people spend significantly more time using screens than is recommended by health professionals. Excessive screen time has been blamed for several ills, including obesity and poor mental health. To mitigate these negative effects, we need to understand the things that encourage children to spend lots of time in front of a screen.
Technology is designed to be addictive. And a society that is “mobile dependent” has a hard time spending even minutes away from their app-enabled smartphones.
In 2017, U.S. adults spent an average of three hours and 20 minutes a day using their smartphones and tablets. This is double the amount from just five years ago, according to an annual survey of internet trends. Another survey suggests most of that time is spent on arguably unproductive activities like Facebook, gaming and other types of social media.
This addiction has consequences.
Of all screen-time enabling devices, smartphones are the truly ubiquitous ones, which in essence makes them tools of equity in the 21st century that provide access to billions of people around the world.
John J Reilly, University of Strathclyde ; Anthony (Tony) Okely, University of Wollongong; Catherine Draper, University of the Witwatersrand, and…