Peer-Reviewed Study

Young Children's Use of Smartphones and Tablets

Jul 2020 🇺🇸 Pediatrics (American Academy of Pediatrics) Ages 3–5 PEER-REVIEWED PAYWALLED — LINKED, NOT HOSTED

Radesky and colleagues at the University of Michigan used passive-sensing apps and device battery screenshots — rather than parent recall — to measure how 346 children aged 3–5 actually used smartphones and tablets. About a third of the children owned a personal device, and among those, average measured use ran to roughly two hours a day, with YouTube and YouTube Kids among the most-used apps. Comparing objective device logs to parents' own estimates, the study found parents commonly misjudged their child's use in either direction — underestimating or overestimating it by a similar margin — suggesting self-report screen-time measures used in much prior research may be unreliable. The authors present passive device sensing as a more accurate tool for researchers and clinicians going forward, without claiming any particular amount of use is itself harmful.

35% of 3-to-5-year-olds owned a personal device

Just over a third of the 346 children in the study had their own smartphone or tablet rather than only using a shared household device.

~115 minutes/day average measured use

Among children with their own device, passively sensed average daily use was about 115 minutes, with wide variation across the sample.

Parents misjudged use ~70% of the time

About 35.7% of parents underestimated and 34.8% overestimated their child's actual measured device use compared with passive-sensing data.

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CITATION

Radesky, Jenny S., Heidi M. Weeks, Rosa Ball, Alexandria Schaller, Samantha Yeo, Joke Durnez, Matthew Tamayo-Rios, Mollie Epstein, Heather Kirkorian, Sarah Coyne, and Rachel Barr. "Young Children's Use of Smartphones and Tablets." Pediatrics 146, no. 1 (July 2020): e20193518. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2019-3518

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