Will reducing screen time increase level of physical activity in children?

Source: University of Southern Denmark Faculty of Health Sciences

Many of us feel that young people these days are spending too much of their free time on screens and missing out on physical activities. This might be a misconception because children have always been sedentary during most of their awake time.

This has been shown every time researchers have measured physical activity among different groups of children regardless of their cultural background and geography (also before the introduction of smartphones and gaming consoles). Thus, researchers continue to debate whether children’s use of screen media devices truly affects their engagement in physical activity or if screen time is just replacing other sedentary behaviours. A group of researchers from the University of Southern Denmark has attempted to answer this question in a carefully designed randomized controlled trial.

A total of 89 families (181 children, 164 adults) were randomly allocated in two groups. Families allocated to the intervention had to handover their smartphones and tablets for two weeks and reduce their recreational screen media use to less than three hours per week. Families allocated to the control group were instructed to continue with their usual screen media habits. Participants daily physical activity was objectively assessed over seven days using accelerometers mounted on the thigh and trunk at baseline and at 2-week follow-up.

“We found that children in the screen reduction intervention group had an average of 45 min more daily physical activity compared to children in the control group. The difference between the groups were largest on weekend days where children in the screen reduction group had an average of 73 min more physical activity compared to children in the control group,” says Jesper Pedersen, Ph.D. student at the University of Southern Denmark.

“The results of our trial clearly suggest that spending many hours using digital screens after school, kindergarten, and on weekends displaces some activities where children move more around. Thus, it is important that families with children create healthy and balanced use of screen devices in the home environment,” says Anders Grøntved, Professor at the University of Southern Denmark.

Parents were also a part of the study. Middle-aged or young adults are typically less physically active during their leisure time compared to children and their recreational use of screen media devices is at least as high as that of children. However, to the researchers surprise, there was no significant difference in daily movement during leisure between adults in the screen reduction group and the control group.

“We were quite surprised when we saw the numbers for the adult participants. A potential explanation may be that adults are less spontaneous in their physical activity behaviour compared to children. Although the results suggest that reducing screen media use is an ineffective way of increasing adults daily movement, it may still be a good idea for adults to balance their screen use in the home because we know from previous research that parental screen use in the home is strongly associated with children’s use of screen media. A reduction of recreational screen use among parents could be a key to balancing children’s own use,” explains Grøntved.

← Previous Next →

Martin Doherty, writing for The Conversation, says that at the age of about four, children reach important milestones in brain development.

One of these is a huge improvement in understanding others’ thoughts and feelings. This is the start of empathy. Another is in spatial thinking—understanding how objects are positioned and related. This is the beginning of the ability to read maps.

Martin and his colleague, Catherine Sayer, conducted a study with 175 two to five-year-olds to explore how children are able to use scale models to figure out where something is in the real world. At about four, children are able to use a scale model of a room to work out where something is. We thought that this might result from children’s understanding of how one thing can represent something else. But we actually found that four-year-olds’ ability to use scale models came from their spatial abilities.

At the same age, children start to understand that someone’s behaviour is due to what that person believes, not necessarily what is really the case. This has interesting consequences.

If you’ve played hide-and-seek with young children, you may have noticed that they aren’t always very good at it. They love the ritual of looking in all the wrong places first, but beforehand they may tell you where they are going to hide, hide in the same place every time, or not be especially hidden.

After their fourth birthday, they get much better at hide and seek. They understand that the seeker looks in the wrong places because they don’t know where the hider is.

At about three to four children also start to tell lies. They realize they can make someone believe something that isn’t true.

Understanding symbols

Martin’s earlier research with fellow psychologist Josef Perner suggests that four-year-olds don’t just start to understand how others’ minds work. Figuring this out is part of the development of an understanding of “representation”—that symbols, like thoughts, words, or pictures, can be used to stand for something else.

Children start to think about how words relate to objects. This means, for instance, knowing that “animal” can refer to something you already have a name for, such as “rabbit”. This might help children learn the new word.

Their ability to use a understand the components of pictures also improves around this age. Very young children use a lot of trial and error to complete a jigsaw, picking up random pieces to see if they fit. By the time they are about four years old, they start to use the picture as a guide, trying to connect lines and match bits of colour, while checking the guide picture on the box lid.

Developmental experiments

Another ability children develop at around four is using scale models. A classic set of developmental experiments involved a model of a regular household room. The real room had typical furniture—sofa, table, cupboard and so on—and the model had miniature versions laid out in the same way.

Children were shown where something was hidden in the model and told to find an object hidden in “the same place” in the room. Children of around four can find the object using the identical layouts. If shown a sticker under a particular chair in the model room, for example, they can go straight to the “same” chair in the other room. This is the fundamental understanding required to read maps.

Adults see scale models and maps as representations. Maps represent a town or a country. A scale model of, say, the Eiffel Tower represents the real thing. At first, Martin suspected children’s ability to use scale models is more evidence of understanding representation at this age.

He was wrong. Instead, the researchers found that this ability is based on a development in children’s spatial abilities that also occurs at about four. This is the ability to think about spaces and where objects are within them. Spatial abilities help with maths skills, and good spatial ability is linked to an interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Their experiment was simple. They compared the model room task with a test of understanding how representation works. The two abilities develop around the same age, but they found they were not related. Children who could do one task couldn’t necessarily do the other.

They also had a test of purely spatial ability. Children who passed the model room task also passed the spatial task. So it looks like the model room task relied on children‘s spatial thinking.

They don’t yet know why two important but apparently unrelated abilities arise at the same time. Perhaps it’s related to changes in the growing brain at this interesting age.

Provided by The Conversation.

Image supplied by Freepik.