According to the American Association of Pediatrics guidelines, children aged <2 years should not have any ST, and those aged 2–5 years should be limited to 1 hour of high-quality education programs per day, monitored by their caregivers. Excessive ST has been associated with language and motor skill developmental delay, in addition to its psychosocial impact. ĭue to the malleability of children’s social and intellectual development in the early years, it is critical to evaluate the impact of ST during this period. In the United States, children between the ages of 0–8 years spend more than 2 hours per day on screens in western India, the mean screen time (ST) is 2.7 hours among children aged 2–6 years. Children today are exposed to screen-based entertainment and information, which has become an integral part of their lives. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: All relevant data are within the manuscript and its Supporting Information files.įunding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.Įlectronic media usage has seen explosive growth globally. Received: MaAccepted: JPublished: July 6, 2021Ĭopyright: © 2021 Varadarajan et al. PLoS ONE 16(7):Įditor: Vijayaprasad Gopichandran, ESIC Medical College & PGIMSR, INDIA There is an urgent need to include education on ST limits at the primary healthcare level.Ĭitation: Varadarajan S, Govindarajan Venguidesvarane A, Ramaswamy KN, Rajamohan M, Krupa M, Winfred Christadoss SB (2021) Prevalence of excessive screen time and its association with developmental delay in children aged <5 years: A population-based cross-sectional study in India. A very high prevalence of excessive ST was identified, with a significant association with developmental delay in children. Increased ST was significantly associated with developmental delay, in particular, in the domains of language acquisition and communication.
Excessive ST was significantly associated with the mothers’ ST, screen usage at bedtime, birth order (in children < 2 years), and attending school (in children ≥ 2 years).
The mean ST was 2.39 hours/day (95% confidence interval : 2.23–2.54), and the prevalence of excessive ST was 73% (95% CI: 69.2–76.8). The Communication DEALL Developmental Checklist was used to assess child development. ST estimates were obtained from parents/guardian after a 7-day observation period. A total of 718 children (396 rural and 322 urban) were selected, using a cluster random sampling method. A population-based cross-sectional study was conducted in the field practice area of rural and urban health centers in Tamil Nadu, India. This study aimed to determine the burden of ST, associated sociodemographic factors, and its impact on domains of child development. No previous population-based studies have evaluated ST and child development in India. The global growth of electronic media usage among children has caused concerns regarding screen time (ST) impact on child development.
0 kommentar(er)
