2023-09-14 03:00:01
To what extent do young children exposed to screens see their development altered? By publishing a new study in The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, on August 29, a French team relaunched this burning debate.
The study, in fact, leads its authors to put into perspective the negative impact of durations of exposure to television, computers, game consoles, tablets and smartphones on the brains of children aged 2 and 3 years old. and a half or 5 and a half years. They even qualify as ” modest “ the harmful effect of these screens, once the family environment and the child’s lifestyle are taken into account. These results have barely been published, however, their interpretation divides experts, with some warning of the dangers of minimizing the harmful effects of screens, far from being trivial.
“The context of screen use would play an important role, undoubtedly more than just the time spent in front of screens”summarizes Jonathan Bernard, from the Center for Research in Epidemiology and Statistics (National Institute of Health and Medical Research [Inserm]National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment, Paris Cité and Sorbonne-Paris-Nord universities), who led this study.
The authors analyzed data from nearly fourteen thousand children followed within the French ELFE cohort [étude longitudinale française depuis l’enfance]. This is the first cohort, in mainland France, dedicated to the regular monitoring of children born in 2011 from birth until adulthood.
The researchers then assessed these toddlers’ language development at 2 years old, their nonverbal reasoning at 3 1/2 years old, and their overall cognitive development at 3 1/2 and 5 1/2 years old. They also measured the weight, in this development, many other factors linked to the socio-economic status of their family (level of education of parents, working time, income, presence of brothers and sisters, etc.), to the child himself (sex, premature birth or not) and to his daily activities (childcare arrangements, frequency of activities shared with parents, sleep duration, time spent outside, games without screens, etc.).
The importance of the family environment
Time spent exposed to screens is indeed harmful to the development of the child’s brain, confirms this team. But she qualifies this observation: this relationship “appears much weaker when the family living environment is correctly taken into account”. According to the authors’ observations, the impact of screens on cognitive development drops by 40% to 80% once the weight of family factors is taken into account, and by an additional 10% to 20% once the child’s other activities are taken into account. also considered. A child who reads a lot, for example, will have better cognitive development than a child who reads little, all things being equal, which must be taken into account according to the authors.
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