Kids are spending well over seven hours a day on an electronic device. This is an epidemic that has grown and will continue to grow through out the years. Lets just consider that fact that a couple of years ago maybe one in fifteen kids had a cell phone. Now days almost every kid we see has a cell phone. Before kids would look forward to going outside and playing but know days all kids look forward to is watching tv, playing video games, or being on their phones. Don’t believe me? A survey was taken by two-thousand parents of five to ten-year old’s, and one in four kids believes that video games are a form of exercise. That same survey should that three in four kids spend less than sixty minutes outside. So, the question is should kids be allowed to spend as much time as they want on their electronic devices? And what are the physical, and mental health problems that come from this? I will be discussing ten health reasons why we should restrict the amount of time that our kids spend on an electronic device.
Lets begin with something we all heard as kids, “Don’t sit to close to the tv”. As a child I didn’t take this phrase into consideration, but know that I’m older I realize that our parents would say this to us to protect our eyesight. This is the first problem I want to address. A recent study done by the National Eye Institute found that frequency of cases of myopia in children has spiked in recent years, and for those who do not know what myopia is; it’s a condition where the patient can see close things for example read a book but cannot see this in the distance. The two main reasons for this is because of the time spent close to a screen, and the second believed reason is because of a lack of spending time in the outdoors. Lets focus our attention on the first reason, although this may also be genetic there’s no excuse for the time we allow our children to spend starring at an electronic device. As for the second reason this may be a direct effect from spending more time indoors than going outdoors.
A major epidemic in America is obesity now before you freak out and say how can he blame obesity on screen time? Well I’m not placing the complete blame on it but a high amount of it. A research done at Harvard university showed that children who have a tv in their rooms are more likely to become obese. Siting for an extended amount of time can lead to weight gain, but that’s not it most of the ads on tv are about food these are made to trigger your body to feel like it needs food, thus leading to the weight gain. This is all part of a giant cycle that needs to be broken by setting rules on the amount of time our child can spend on a electronic screen.
So, we know that screen time can affect our children in a physical way, but can it also affect the child’s emotional health? Well according to a study done by Dr. Asad khan from the university of queen’s land Australia it can be. The results from this study where published in the journal Mental Health and Physical Activity, this showed that teens that exercised less than an hour a day and spent 2 or more hours stuck on a screen developed symptoms of depression compared to those who did spend at least an hour of their day exercising. Further research shows that children who spend a large part of their day have a spike in low self-esteem, anxiety and depression. Why could this be? Well according to the board director of UNICEF Lily Caprani said that “interacting on social media doesn’t come close to doing it in person.” She later on went to say that ” You have to be physically present with your friends to get the benefits of the social interaction. Texting, Facebooking or even chatting on the phone has a remoteness that means you lose a lot of the positive impact.”
In our current culture, you can hardly avoid screens even if you wanted to. In fact, a study done in 2016 found that on average American adults spent more than ten hours a day on their screens. No matter how much you might want to get away from screens, electronics make up a large part of our lives. Not only has the amount of time we spend on screens increased, but so has the diagnosis of ADHD. Research has found that between the years 2003 and 2011, the diagnosis of ADHD in American children rose by 43 percent. The numbers have gone through the roof in a short amount of years. Both screen time and ADHD diagnosis increased in the past years, could there be a connection between these two?
