Summer vacation is upon us. For parents, that can mean looking for ways to entertain the kids until school starts again. After you've hit all the parks, invested in summer camp, and done all the messy crafts you can do, it's tempting to turn to the controversial option of giving your kids access to games, videos, and other things to keep them busy. Some parents don't mind digital entertainment for their children, but others limit or outright ban it. Is screen time bad for kids? Here's what science has to say.
Does screen time distract from family time?
Drawing a direct link between screen time and any sort of emotional or cognitive development in children is incredibly difficult, if not impossible. There are many factors at work in our children’s development, whether they're conscious choices we make as parents or consequences of our environment. Singling out and identifying a direct cause for any particular type of behavior is a challenge.
Singling out and identifying a direct cause for any particular type of behavior is a challenge.
Proponents of minimizing screen time often promote the importance of putting away screens specifically at meal time so that families can spend that time together. The evidence is mixed, however, on whether or not family meals have a measurable impact on academic success or child behavior. Studies from two decades ago began to tout the positive effects of family meals and claimed that adolescents, in particular, fare better when families spend time engaging with each other over breakfast and dinner. But further investigation has found some of these initial studies to be limited (in their use of a control sample, for example) and even biased in some cases due to limited samples.
Authors of a study of 21,400 children between the ages of 5 and 15 used that large sample size to try to alleviate some of these biases. They were not able to draw a direct link between families who dined together and the children’s academic success or productivity. Instead, they found the bigger correlations related to race or ethnicity, single parent household status, socioeconomic status, and other aspects of family routine.
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