Environmental Effects Of Screen Time On Infants And Toddlers

Introduction

Over the past twenty years, human beings have experienced a massive paradigm shift from traditional industrial society to digital society. Touchscreen devices have been the focus of this change, bringing in a totally different lifestyle. The sight of babies playing with touchscreens is not a new phenomenon. Toddlers sit in the strollers watching cartoons on their parents' smartphones. Young children with headphones larger than their heads bump into you on the sidewalk. And it is normal to walk into a restaurant and notice that at many tables, every family member is chatting or texting away on their phones. Mobile media have become an essential part of family life, even for infants and toddlers. The topic of screen time, whether

New-borns (0-3 months) should sleep 14 to 17 hours a day, including naps. Infants (4-11 months) should sleep 12 to 15 hours a day, and for toddlers, 11 to 14 hours a day. Evidences showed that night-time sleep is as crucial as healthy eating and exercise for children to develop. So, any environmental effects found to reduce the quality of sleep should be supervised and a recent study has found that there is a significant relationship between the use of touchscreen devices with sleep problems in infants and toddlers. Traditional screen time, such as television and video games, is well known to affect sleep, but with the pervasiveness of touchscreen device, it had created a link between media use and loss of sleep might significant for infants and toddlers as well. This is worrisome because when infants are unable to get the amount of sleep they need, their cognitive development will be endangered. In 2017, a research team led by Tim Smith from Birkbeck University of London had published a study about the relationship between touchscreen devices and sleep in infants and toddlers. Their results showed that the same disruption effect applies to these modern devices too. By surveying parents about their children’s touchscreen devices usage and sleep patterns, they have found that every additional hour of tablet or smartphone use between children among the ages of six months and three

When analysing the results, the researchers controlled for age, sex, TV exposure, and maternal education. According to their findings, infants and toddlers who spent more time with a touchscreen device slept less at night. Some of these kids managed to nap a bit longer during the day, but they still slept for less time overall. On average, each hour that a child spent on a smartphone or tablet resulted in 26 minutes less night-time sleep, and about 10 minutes more daytime sleep, amounting to 15.6 minutes less total sleep per night which mean 95 hours of less sleep per year. Even though children who spent more time on touchscreens slept more during the day, overall sleep in a 24-hour period decreased as touchscreen use increased. Touchscreen use was also related to an increase in the time it took these kids to fall asleep, but there seemed to be no impact on the number of times these kids woke up at