Diary of an academic mum

Dr Breanne Kunstler (BBiomedSci, BHealthSci, MPhysio, PhD). I have written a series of posts on screen time and the potential effects it might have on the health of our kids. This post will provide a brief summary of those posts and finish with some recommendations for parents on how they can support a healthy relationship between screens and their kids. Summary of screen time and its potential relationship with poor health Post 1 provided a brief summary of screen time and the reasons why parents are concerned by it (e.g. cyberbullying). It is recommended that children spend less than an hour using screens daily, but Aussie kids are far exceeding this number. I suggested that there was little evidence to support this 1 hour recommendation at this time. Posts 2 and 3 involved exploring the potential physical and psychological health effects of screen time on our children. I am confident that high screen time is related to kids having a poor diet, poor heart health, lo...

Dr Breanne Kunstler (BBiomedSci, BHealthSci, MPhysio, PhD). Last week I wrote about the psychological health impacts of high screen time on children. This is the fourth post in a series of five posts on kids' screen time and will involve examining some of the perceptions parents have of screen time and if it is really all that bad. Parents, naturally, have the best interests of their children in the forefront of their minds at all times. However, this doesn’t mean that their intentions to do what they think is best for their child is actually what they do (see the ‘ intention-behaviour gap ’). This isn’t because they are terrible people or that they are selfish. Rather, life gets in the way and sometimes they just need to put the infant down in front of the TV so they can go to the toilet. In fact, 85% of Australian parents report using screens as a “digital babysitter”, allowing them to get things done. I’m certainly one of those 85%. Image 1: A digital babysitte...

Dr Breanne Kunstler (BBiomedSci, BHealthSci, MPhysio, PhD). Last week I wrote about the physical health impacts of high screen time on children. This is the third post in a series of posts on children’s screen time and will involve examining some of the psychological health risks associated with screen time. I did a quick search and found hundreds of studies on screen time and child health, dozens of which were review-level (some of the best evidence you can get). I looked at some of the highest quality review-level evidence to inform this post. Basically, if I found high-quality review-level evidence to support relationships between health and screen time then I was pretty confident that the relationships exist. Let’s have a look at what the research I found has to say about the psychological health risks associated with screen time for kids. I will use a three-part system ( 'confident', 'hmm maybe' and 'unlikely' ) to indicate how confident I am...