Parents be warned: Limit screen time for kids or be ready to pay the price

It was exactly four years ago the World Health Organisation (WHO) recommended that children under five years of age must spend less time sitting watching screens, or restrained in prams and seats, get better quality sleep and have more time for active play if they are to grow up healthy. The guidelines were developed by a WHO panel of experts, who assessed the effects on young children of inadequate sleep and activity and reviewed evidence around the benefits of increased activity levels. Failure to meet the then physical activity recommendations was responsible for more than 5mn deaths globally each year across all age groups, the April 2019 guidelines had pointed out while explaining that over 23% of adults and 80% of adolescents were not sufficiently physically active.
What Apple CEO Tim Cook suggested the other day is also in same vein. He has encouraged parents to limit screen time for their kids, something that seems counterintuitive to selling iPhones but nevertheless he feels is important. During an interview with GQ magazine, Cook warned parents that kids are ‘digital’ now, and suggested that ‘hard rails’ are needed to make sure children do not spend too much time in front of a phone screen. “Kids are born digital, they’re digital kids now. And it is, I think, really important to set some hard rails around it,” Cook said after GQ senior staff writer Zach Baron mentioned that his own young child is “obsessed” with his phone. “We make technology to empower people to be able to do things they couldn’t do, to create things they couldn’t create, to learn things they couldn’t learn. And I mean, that’s really what drives us,” the Apple chief continued. “We don’t want people using our phones too much. We’re not incentivised for that. We don’t want that. We provide tools so people don’t do that.”
Cook’s comments come as studies have shown that too much screen time could alter children’s developing brains and increase their risk for mood disorders. About one third of youths spend more than four hours per day looking at phone, computer or TV screens, a recent study published in the Journal of Behavioural Addictions said. Kids ages 9-10 who spend more time in front of screens exhibited higher levels of depression and anxiety by the time they turned 11 or 12.
Cook, who says users ought to take periodic breaks from their phones, pointed out that Apple has developed tools for iPhone users to track their screen time. Parents can use the iPhone’s Screen Time feature to generate activity reports, monitor how often their children pick up their device and which apps and websites they are using. “We try to get people tools in order to help them put the phone down. Because my philosophy is, if you’re looking at the phone more than you’re looking in somebody’s eyes, you’re doing the wrong thing. So we do things like Screen Time. I pretty religiously look at my report,” he said. If the CEO of the world’s largest tech company by revenue and biggest company by market capitalisation is doing so, the message is loud and clear.