New York, Nov 26

Researchers have found that the amount of time children are spending each day watching television or using a computer or mobile device is increasing at an alarming rate.

The study, published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, found that children's daily screen time increased from 53 minutes at age 12 months to more than 150 minutes at 3 years old.

According to the researchers, by age 8, children in US were more likely to log the highest amount of screen time if they had been in home-based childcare or were born to first-time mothers.

"Our results indicate that screen habits begin early, this finding suggests that interventions to reduce screen time could have a better chance of success if introduced early," said study senior auhtor Edwina Yeung, NIH's Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) in the US.

For the findings, the research team analysed data from the Upstate KIDS Study, originally undertaken to follow the development of children conceived after infertility treatments and born in New York State from 2008 to 2010.

Mothers of nearly 4,000 children who took part in the study responded to questions on their kids' media habits when they were 12, 18, 24, 30, and 36 months of age. They also responded to similar questions when the children were seven and eight years old.

The study compiled additional demographic information on the mothers and children from birth records and other surveys.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends avoiding digital media exposure for children under 18 months of age, introducing children 18 to 24 months of age to screen media slowly, and limiting screen time to an hour a day for children from 2 to 5 years of age.

In the current study, researchers found that 87 per cent of the children had screen time exceeding these recommendations.

However, while screen time increased throughout toddlerhood, by age 7 and 8, screen time fell to under 1.5 hours per day. The researchers believe this decrease relates to time consumed by school-related activities.

The study authors classified the children into two groups based on how much their average daily screen time increased from age 1 to age 3.

The first group, 73 per cent of the total, had the lowest increase, from an average of nearly 51 minutes a day to nearly an hour and 47 minutes a day.

The second group, 27 per cent of the total, had the highest increase, from nearly 37 minutes of screen time a day to about four hours a day.

Higher levels of parental education were associated with lower odds of inclusion in the second group.

In addition, girls were slightly less likely to be in the second group, compared to boys, while children of first-time mothers were more likely to be in the high-increase group, the study said.

Infants spending too much time on screen: Study