How much screen time is too much for young children?

By Oneida Casado

As a parent and kindergarten teacher, this question is often on my mind. When I watch my young students play and interact with peers, I wonder if the overuse of screen time has put a strain on peer to peer social interaction and physical activity. In the 1970s, when I was a young child, screen time was limited to television. Don’t get me wrong, we watched a lot of it but when our parents turned it off and told us to go outside to play, we had no other choice but to walk away from the screen and focus our attention on outdoor activities with peers. Today, screen time is much more complex. Children, even very young ones, have multiple tools to choose from. There is a veritable smorgasbord of technology at their fingertips! Not only do they have iPhones, video consoles and computers to choose from, they also get to choose from a wide variety of platforms!

In the following TEDx Talks video, researcher Florence Breslin, make a case for screens not being necessarily harmful to young children. In fact, she points to a study where her research team is following 12,000 kids for 10 years so they can understand “normal typical brain development.” One of the more interesting findings was that as they followed 9 and 10 year olds’ use of screen time in order to be social, they discovered that these kids actually “reported less sleep problems and more physical activity than some of their peers.” However, Breslin cautions that there is still not enough information out there to form a solid, scientific opinion because it is a “fairly new area of research.”

In the monthly newsletter Health Matters Stories of Science, Care &Wellness, the article, What Does Too Much Screen Time Do to Children’s Brains? written by child behavioral expert Dr. Jennifer Cross, states that Early data from a landmark National Institutes of Health (NIH) study that began in 2018 indicates that children who spent more than two hours a day on screen-time activities scored lower on language and thinking tests, and some children with more than seven hours a day of screen time experienced thinning of the brain’s cortex, the area of the brain related to critical thinking and reasoning. While she admits that they are not sure what this data means yet, she believes that it could point to the overuse of screen time limiting a child’s use of other resources such as play and imagination. https://healthmatters.nyp.org/what-does-too-much-screen-time-do-to-childrens-brains/

Is there such a thing as too much screen time for young children? How much is too much? Does too much screen time negatively impact a young child’s developing brain? I wonder what new information future research will show us about young children and the use of technology!