Truth About Screen Time

May 2018

Mount Sinai South Nassau Truth In Medicine Poll: Sixty-Five Percent of Kids Spend 3 Hours or More on Screens a Day

• Twenty-two percent are glued to screens for five hours or more
• Nearly half of parents don’t even try to limit screen time
  

Metro-area children are spending an average of 3.41 hours/day of screen time for non-academic purposes on an array of devices - smartphones, televisions, tablets and computers – and 22 percent of them are glued to the screen for five or more hours, according to Mount Sinai South Nassau’s latest Truth in Medicine™ poll.

Sixty-five percent of children are spending three or more hours per day on such devices, the poll showed.

Only 25% of parents say their efforts to limit screen time for their children are very successful, according to the poll of parents in New York City and on Long Island. Sixty-two percent of parents said they do not use any parental control settings on their children's screen devices.

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has warned that too much screen time – especially in young children – can delay cognitive, language, social and emotional development and possibly be a factor in childhood obesity. The Academy, for instance, recommends limiting screen time for children between two to five years of age to no more than one hour per day of high-quality programming.

But the poll results show that less than half of parents surveyed knew about these recommendations, and only 13% heard about them from their pediatrician.

The smartphone is the device eating up most of children’s non-academic screen time (33%), with the tablet (29%) and TV (28%) following close behind, the poll showed.

Nearly half of parents polled – 45 percent – said they don’t even try to limit the time their children spend on smartphones, tablets, computers and watching TV.

Fifty-one percent of parents of a child age 6 and under said they use parental controls to monitor their children’s screen time, but parental control drops significantly as a child ages. About seven in ten parents of metro-area children age 10 and under take measures to limit their children’s screen time, but only 36% of parents of a teen actively try.

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• "Truth In Medicine" Poll Results (PDF)
• "Truth In Medicine" Poll Graphs (PDF)

Mount Sinai South Nassau 'Truth in Medicine' Poll: Sixty-Five Percent of Kids Spend 3 Hours or More on Screens a Day