Screen Time for Babies: Unsafe at Any Dose?
A Japanese study reported that the more time per day 1-year-olds spent in front of screens, the worse their performance on standard developmental evaluations at ages 2 and 4. Delays in acquiring communication and problem-solving skills were the most prevalent and enduring effects.
One-year-olds who log more screen time are at higher risk for developmental delays at ages 2 and 4 — and the greater the screen time, the more serious and prolonged the deficits, according to a study published this month in JAMA Pediatrics.
The most pronounced effects involved delays in communication and problem-solving. Other measures of childhood development lagged at the two-year follow-up but vanished by age 4.
Miss a day, miss a lot. Subscribe to The Defender’s Top News of the Day. It’s free.
However, the researchers cited a 2020 study that also associated high device use with communication deficits — but conversely, found “better-quality screen use” involving educational content was linked to “stronger child language skills.”
Parents and babies co-viewing content, and a later onset of screen use, also seemed to be beneficial, according to the 2020 study.
The multi-university research team behind the JAMA Pediatrics study, led by first author Ippei Takahashi at the Graduate School of Medicine, Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan, defined screen time as the number of hours per day 1-year-olds spent watching television, playing video games and using mobile phones, tablets or other electronic devices.
How the study was designed
Between July 2013 and March 2017, the Tohoku Medical Megabank Project Birth and Three-Generation Cohort Study recruited 7,097 mother-child pairs at 50 obstetric clinics and hospitals in the Miyagi and Iwate prefectures in Japan. Fifty-two percent of the subjects were boys.
Researchers grouped subjects according to one of four screen time exposure categories: less than one hour per day (48.5% of subjects), between one and two hours (29.5%), between two and four hours (17.9%) and four hours or more (4.1%).
The four exposure groups were matched for sex, maternal age and education, number of siblings, household income and demographics, and whether the mother had experienced postpartum depression.
Investigators applied the Japanese version of the Ages & Stages Questionnaires (3rd edition) to evaluate five developmental areas: communication, gross and fine motor skills, problem-solving and socialization.
Scoring in each area ranged from 0-60 points, with developmental delay defined as a score that was less than two standard deviations below the mean score. This high threshold means that to be counted, a value had to be lower than 95% of all other results.
What the researchers found
The researchers found that, generally, the more screen exposure at age 1, the greater the later deficit and the longer it persisted.
However, not all measures were negatively affected and not all deficits at age 2 were evident by age 4.
