Screen-related Sedentary Behaviors: Children's and Parents' Attitudes, Motivations, and Practices

Abstract

Objective-To investigate school-aged children's and parents' attitudes, social influences, and intentions toward excessive screen-related sedentary behaviour (S-RSB).Design-A cross-sectional study using a survey methodology.Setting-Elementary schools in London, Ontario, Canada.Participants-All grades five and six students, their parents and teachers in the participating schools were invited to voluntarily participate; 508 student-parent pairs completed the surveys. Main Outcome Measure-Children's screen-related behaviours.Analysis-Data were analyzed using the Independent Student t-test to compare differences of continuous variables and the Chi-Square test to test for differences of categorical variables.Results-Children spent 3.3 ± 0.15 (standard error) hours per day engaged in screen-related activities. Entertainment, spending time with family, and boredom were cited as the top three reasons for television viewing and video game playing. Compared to "low-screen-users" (i.e. < 2hours/day), "high-screen-users" (i.e. ≥2hours/day) held less negative attitudes toward excessive S-RSB and perceived loosened parental rules on screen use. Parents of "high-screen-users" held less negative attitudes towards children's S-RSB, had fewer rules about their children's screen use, and were more likely to be sedentary themselves.Conclusions and Implications-Intervention strategies aimed at reducing S-RSB should involve both parents and children and should focus on fostering behavioural changes and promoting parental role-modeling.

Impact of e-Discipline on Children's Screen Time

“…These averages indicate a gender difference in screen time, similar to other studies. 24,30,31 Indeed, the girls averaged significantly (F = 32.351, df = , p < 0.0005) less screen time than the boys did. Of girls and boys, 61.8% and 70.0% exceeded the AAP's screen time recommendation, respectively.…”

“…In accordance with other research 17,24 that requested participation from parents regarding children's screen time, 2,759 questionnaires were filled out by mothers (87.6%). The vast majority of children had TVs, followed by computers, video game consoles, and cell phones in that order, as reported in Table 1.…”

“…Furthermore, one study showed that 34.4% of parents use screen devices to keep their children quiet. 24 These traditional parental practices could pose a risk of increasing children's screen time, which could have adverse effects. Furthermore, there is no evidence of the effectiveness in addressing the child's original behavior problem.…”

“…The questionnaire achieved a response rate of 66.1%. Some of the questionnaires were excluded from the analysis because of (a) missing values for the dependent variable, screen time; (b) outlier values exceeding a screen time of 12 hours a day; 24 and (c) screen time greater than zero where screen devices were not available.…”

Screen-related sedentary behaviours of school-aged children

“…They also felt that parents should serve as good role models for their children, a perception that is validated as parents and families play a key role in influencing most aspects of children's behavioural patterns 9 . In fact, our data indicated that sedentary activities primarily took place at home; children spent 3.4 hours per day engaged in S-RSB, and only 30 of these minutes occurred during school hours 10 .…”