Impacts of excessive screen time on children and young people

Written By: John Parkin and Shahina Pardhan
5 min read
Impacts of excessive screen time on children and young people John Parkin and Shahina Pardhan, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK   The COVID-19 pandemic caused an unprecedented move to emergency remote learning around the world (Hodges et al., 2020), with movement restricted and schools partially closed. This led to increased digital screen time for children and young people in schooling and leisure activities, with children showing the greatest increase in screen time compared with adolescents and adults (Pardhan et al., 2021). While this enabled children to learn through the pandemic, it also changed their screen time behaviour. We wanted to understand the potential risks of increased screen time to the eye and to general health, and identify ways to mitigate the risks posed to children and young people post-pandemic. We analysed research articles in May 2021 about COVID-19, screen time and children. In our literature review, we found research on the amount of sc

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