Jody McKenzie and Doug Grozelle walk alongside their daughter Mackenzie, 6, as she rides her bicycle near their home in Binbrook, Ont., on Oct. 27, 2020.Jody Mckenzie was careful not to give her six-year-old daughter much screen time early in the pandemic. She would do her school work online and that would be about it. But when summer came, the rules got a little too relaxed. Soon she was watching hours of TikTok videos, often in the dark.
“Some parents were literally reporting that their children were having 13 hours of screen time a day,” says Emma Duerden, who led the study. Even if lots of screen time doesn’t lead to long-term effects on children’s brain development, it is likely having short-term effects, Dr. Duerden says. “That’s the stuff that gets concerning to me, is when we normalize a biologically and sociologically abnormal routine,” Dr. Tremblay says.
But not all screen time is bad, says Victoria Talwar, a professor in the department of educational and counselling psychology at McGill University.Story continues below advertisement