 by Elizabeth Cespedes, MS Children in the United States consume an average of 7 hour/day of screen media. Television is the biggest culprit, but time spent on cellular phones, in front of the computer, on a tablet, or playing video games contribute a good bit of that time too.
Screen media is present throughout children’s lives – at school, in free time and even in bedrooms. But is this constant exposure bad for children’s health? The answer seems to be yes, especially because of the link between excessive screen time and less sleep. Multiple studies have found that more time spent viewing television or other screen media predicts less daily sleep in children, from infancy through adolescence. Having a television or a computer in the bedroom is worse, leading to more total media use, and regardless of this total use, to a later bedtime and fewer hours of sleep.
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 by Chrissy Horan, MPH You can probably count on one hand the number of people you know who do not text. And the younger you are, the more common texting is among your peers. Specifically among teenagers, texting is popular with 12-17 year olds sending more than 5 times the number of texts per day as adults. In a prior post, Renata Smith already discussed the rising use of text messaging for weight loss and the state of the literature.
We learned in focus groups with parents that they were more likely to read messages because they were brief, immediate and “hard to ignore”. Just think about how many unread text messages are on your phone versus unread emails in your inbox. In addition to its rising use to encourage weight loss, text messaging has become an important way to share all sorts of health information. Studies have used text messaging to influence smoking cessation, asthma management, sunscreen application, heart failure self-management, prenatal care and medication adherence. |
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