Screen Viewing Remains a Health Concern on Children - Essay Example

Screen Viewing remains a health concern on children Student’s Name Institution Affiliation SCREEN VIEWING A HEALTH CONCERN AMONG CHILDREN The most common sedentary activity with preschoolers’ and school attending participants is screen viewing. It comprises a number of activities and not limited to television sex box, DVDS’/VAS, online games, laptops and touch screen phones. The increased availability of these devices among the children is not a surprise due to improved technological advancements and continued marketing and advertisements of the same globally. Current international statistics by Vanderloo (2014), indicates that 2-6 years old children in Australia spend at least 1.5 to 7.0 hours daily screen viewing. In light of this, this paper therefore, aims to supports vanderloo’s argument that screen viewing remains a health concern for the children while providing relevant evidence to justify this claims. According to Vanderloo (2014), Screen viewing remains a major global health concern’’. Under this case, I tend to support this statement. With serious global health issue among children, screen viewing for over a long period has been connected to a number of health issues among the preschool and school going children which include obesity, academic issues, irregular sleep, high blood pressure and boredom amongst others (Zimmerman, Christakis & Meltzoff, 2007). Therefore, intervention to prevent sedentary behavior from prolonging amongst these children will be vital. Research has placed screen viewing time reduction at position nine of twenty nine items to reduce health concerns on children. Moreover, Screen viewing among preschoolers is associated with negative learning and lack of new skills integration at the expected age among children. Wiexha et al, (2006), give an example of a longitudinal study which was conducted in the USA on 3-year-old children that established negative outcomes at 6 and 7 years of age with excess screen time as the main cause. Salmon et al. (2005), while conducting a study on preschoolers and children found negative associations between television exposure and attention, reading comprehension, and difficulties in solving simple mathematical problems among this group. Television has an adverse impact to the infants, research findings has indicated that, the duration of toy play and sustained attention is always reduced whenever the television is switched on, however, of concern is the health implications associated with the inactivity state among children brought about by excessive screen viewing (Che, Colley & Gorber, 2011). Evidently, children who spend much time screen-viewing without physical exercise have been found to be obese and overweight with a myriad number of heart complications (Sisson, et al., 2010). For instance American academy of pediatrics contends that kids aged between two and five years of age in Australia should spend at most 1 hour/day in screen viewing. Their argument is based on the facts that most children in Australia spend a lot of time indoors and little is being done to sensitize parents on the effect of screen viewing activities amongst children. Obesity amongst children is of primary concern since it associated with this sedentary activities and less active children (Salmon et al., 2005). Survey carried out by the Australia institute of family studies and applied longitudinal studies examined 4000 preschool and school aged children between 4-5 years and 12-13 years respectively to ascertain the effect of screen-viewing on them. They were able to note, children from homes with educated guardians and parents dedicated less in screen viewing. Hence these kids were more active, increasing number of saturated screens in the public areas and homes is the primary reason why children are spending much time glued to the screens (Epstein et al., 2008). This survey suggested that increasing the number of activities that kids do and other extra-curricular activities will help reduce health complications brought about by excessive screen viewing, hence there is a need for parents to level down the rate of screen viewing and also ban their children from screaming television and videos from their bedrooms (Biddle & Asare, 2011). There seems to be a correlation between many studies and vanderloo’s claim on screen viewing and health issues for instance, survey carried out in Spain to determine the association between families and friends based social variables and the associated screen viewing behavior. Found out that the social welfare and interaction of these kids is impacted negatively, having that some are obese and often than not they are ridiculed in school (Fakhouri et al., 2013). With increased levels of stress this children resort to screen watching and food eating which consequently affects their health negatively. The interviewed children illustrated the need to increase self-efficacy as it can at times be crucial based on behavior change. Therefore, the central role of the parent in screen viewing is to understand the dynamics of friends and to target the major areas to reduce this behavior among their children and eventually reducing health problems that this screen-viewing behaviour is likely to bring (Irwin et al., 2005). According to Vanderloo (2014), screen viewing in preschooler could lead to diabetes at an early age, having that this children and preschoolers remain inactive for a longer period of time. Screen viewing has been associated with parental neglect, nonetheless, it’s vital to educate parents on the importance of routine medical checkups, the need to encourage their children to play as well as finding time to participate in curricular activities with their kids to minimize chances of developing any health complications (che, Colley & Gorber, 2011). For instance, cross sectional survey on parental modeling, media equipment and screen viewing among preschooler children was examined, comprising of 750 parents and children aged between 6-8 years. Found out that 75% of the parents and two-fifths of the school aged children used more than an hour per day on screen viewing hence the availability of media equipment in households affects a child’s nature in regards to screen viewing (Epstein et al., 2008). Moreover, the remaining 15% parents reported that their kids are suffering from diabetes mellitus and the same parents consumed over three hours daily screen viewing together with their children. While trying to establish the daily amount of time spent by children aged 18 months on screen viewing and ascertain the correlations that contribute to this behavior of screen viewing, the Australian Department of Health applied cross sectional surveys on parents from postnatal wards and at home visits for new mothers, and later followed by a telephone call at interval of 6, 12, and 18 months of age (Tremblay, et al 2011). The Department of health concluded and recommended that young children below 2 years should not watch television and those in the age bracket of 2-5 years should only watch for a period less than 1 hour to avoid health cases like radiation exposure, partial blindness and mental problems (Zimmerman, Christakis & Meltzoff, 2007). To help draw conclusive recommendations, they used a comprehensive sample thus giving individual level data for a large cohort of births and also potential to measure errors emanating from self-reporting of screen viewing time by parents. Unlike other studies, this survey investigated screen time in children below 2 years of age which is also a significant developmental stage for children. According to Vanderloo (2014), longitudinal studies seems to conclude that children who are 5years of age and who watched television daily for over two hours are like to experience overweight issues, high cholesterol levels and other disorders such as smoking in their adulthood. He states that this health effects are as a result of the postures one takes while watching television, and also the children being displaced from other recreational activities. Too much screen viewing, has been associated with behavioral problems amongst the primary school aged, these effects continues to affect the child in his or her development whether in terms of language, understanding and retaining capacity of subjects taught in school. And as a result parents have spent enormous amounts trying to rectify this problems using physiotherapists but in vain (Wiecha, et al., 2006). Psychological difficulties among the children that spend a lot of time screen viewing increases exponentially. For instance, the Australian health department in UK, in trying to show that the greater the psychological difficulties associated with a higher level of screen viewing among the children would definitely lead to a low level in physical activity found out increased use of laptops and television boxes was highly correlated to psychological defects, after the change in sedentary lifestyle was found out to be inversely related to psychological problems. Spending over two hours in screen related viewing activity, highly exposes kids to psychological disorders (Biddle & Asare, 2011). Further, there are tendencies for children who spend much time screen-view to have in -ability to recognise motion. The University of California, Los Angeles conducted a study, to examine why kids are spending much time screen viewing and how this could be affecting their ability to recognise motion. The participants involved 12 children in the Southern California public school, and the research method involved experiments. The study found out that after excluding some of the sixth graders from technology exposure for five days, they became better in reading human emotions than those who remained exposed to accessing computers and phones (Irwin et al., 2005). On the other hand, Excessive screen viewing among preschoolers and children in school have greater chances in making them poorer in terms of retaining the content taught in class for a good time. Thus, there is a correlation between screen viewing and memory retention, hence, the introduction of iPads and much use of computers in primary school might indeed harm a kid’s ability to retain anything taught (Sisson et al., 2010). Hogan a pediatrician, states that kids who spend most of the time in house without playing or even visiting other kids might not even recognise them in the future when they meet face to face (Che, Colley & Gorber, 2011). Most often much of screen viewing can lead to irregularities in sleep or insomnia. Those kids who spend a lot of time screen viewing, they normally suffer from sleep loss and even hallucinations and night running. For instance, while kids spend much time watching television and videos or movies from You-tube, there are chances that they will spend most of the time there and have less than enough time to rest or sleep. This may lead to mental problems in the medulla oblongata in the long run (Wiecha, Jet al., 2006). In trying to establish the rate at which children attain physical activity and screen viewing time and also develop their demographic differences cross sectional survey was conducted in USA. This was an overview analysis which comprised of 1218 preschooler and school attending aged kids between 6-11 years. The exposure emphasized on age, sex and obesity status. The recommendation that were made on this report suggested adherence to physical exercise and screening time both should be considered as separate entities (Sisson et al., 2010). Those who met physical activities were 70% of the overall children while 54% met the screen viewing recommendations, thus, a clear indication of the downward effects that screen-viewing has on children. In conclusion, despite a few variability, children are fond of engaging in a higher level of screen viewing, mostly at their homes. The availability of modern technology equipment for screen viewing has increased the tendency of preschoolers to remain glued in screen viewing other than partaking other physical activities hence, sedentary time for kids is used much on screen viewing. However the health complication associated with this tendencies are life threatening thus it is vital for parents and guardians to take full charge of what their kids are doing. Moreover, the obesity levels, social problems, high blood pressure and diabetes can all be eliminated or minimized fully by exercising well and following good instructions from the pediatrics. Thus screen viewing is entertaining however, no one should exceed the required time for screen viewing more so the young ones. References Biddle, S. J., & Asare, M. (2011). Physical activity and mental health in children and adolescents: a review of reviews. British journal of sports medicine, bjsports90185. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21807669 che, R., Colley, R. 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