More screen time is linked to poorer child development, study shows

Researchers reviewed decades of research on the impact of screen time on child development, which looked at nearly three million children aged 18 and under from 64 countries, senior author Sheri Madigan, a professor of psychology at the University of Calgary, Canada, told CNN on Tuesday.

In a comment released via the Science Media Centre (SMC), she said that “the main findings confirm what research has been showing for years and which puts the current media and social moral panic surrounding the relationship between young people and screens into perspective: there is an association between screen time and poorer indicators of mental health and academic performance, but it is very small.“Most of the associations were relatively small, like most other predictors of child development, but small does not mean meaningless, particularly when we’re talking about an exposure like screen time, which is nearly universal in children’s lives.”