美国国家公共电台 NPR No Snapchat In The Bedroom? An Online Tool To Manage Kids' Media Use

No Snapchat In The Bedroom? An Online Tool To Manage Kids' Media Use 

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How much time should a child spend watching TV or videos or a phone? What about educational apps? Those are questions that the American Academy of Pediatrics has tried to answer today with its updated guidance on kids and screen time. The academy's old recommendations discouraged any digital media for children under 2 and suggested no more than two hours a day for kids a bit older than that. The new recommendations are more nuanced.

Katherine Hobson has written about this for NPR's health blog Shots. Welcome to the program.

KATHERINE HOBSON, BYLINE 2: Thanks. Good to be here.

SIEGEL: And what do pediatricians know about screens and children's development that they didn't know when they made recommendations in 1999?

HOBSON: Well, there's always new research coming out. And remember, it's very difficult to study these technologies because they come out so quickly and are replaced by something else. One, I think, highlight from these is that the ban on digital media or the discouragement of digital media in kids 2 and younger has been amended 3, and now they say that really kids who are younger than 18 months really should still not be using this stuff with one notable exception, and that's video chat.

There's no real evidence that Skyping or FaceTiming does anything particularly great or anything particularly bad. But because it's usually a quick thing and involves social interaction and usually involves adult supervision 4, you don't really need to worry that your kid's brain is rotting if they're waving hi to mom on her business trip at the end of the day, so that's OK.

Kids who are older than that, who are 18 to 24 months, they're still pretty cautious about digital media. They say that if parents want to introduce digital media, there's some very mixed evidence about whether they get a benefit.

But the key seems to be having, first of all, high-quality media, not just some random 5 cartoon you find online. And the real key is having a parent there. With kids this young, you need to treat this like a book. You need to talk with them about it, relate it to the world. You shouldn't just park your 20-month-old in front of an iPad and leave them there for an hour and figure that they'll sort it out on their own.

SIEGEL: A lot of schoolwork nowadays requires kids to use computers. Do these recommendations take that into account?

HOBSON: They do. They're really talking here about things they're doing for fun outside of schoolwork. But it is interesting, they have kind of done away with this two-hour limit for older kids - 6 and up.

Parents do need to set a time limit and limits on the type of media, but that will really depend on the kid, what they're interested in and your own family values. They say that the priority should be getting enough sleep, getting enough exercise, doing your schoolwork, communicating offline with family and friends.

So they suggest, for example, that you don't have devices in your room, that you unplug them an hour before bed, that you don't use entertainment media while simultaneously 6 doing homework and that you set aside some times and areas in the house where the whole family - and I think this is important - the whole family, including mom and dad, are not on screens.

SIEGEL: The academy has put online a tool for families to set media guidelines. I gather you tried it for your 4-year-old. How'd it work?

HOBSON: It's just come out, so I haven't had a chance to actually put it into practice, but what I found useful is a way to kind of codify 7 some of the feelings and values that I've had floating around in my mind. For example, we are pretty much fine with her spending a limited amount of time watching "Barney" reruns on YouTube. We're not OK with other content, so that helps us kind of make lines about what we are and aren't comfortable with.

And we have come around in the last couple of months to being, you know, more strict, and this helped us kind of say exactly how we're going to be more strict - no screens on weekday mornings, limited amount of time that she can spend on a screen after day care, before dinner, using apps and things that we supervise. So those are the things that we're comfortable with, and I think that now we have them written down and can kind of - we're hoping to actually wave it in her face and say it's the rules. It'll be helpful for all of us.

SIEGEL: That's Katherine Hobson, a contributor to NPR's health blog Shots. Thanks for talking with us.

HOBSON: Thanks very much.