The impact of electronic media on mental and somatic children's health

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijheh.2007.07.003Get rights and content

Abstract

A concise review of the literature on the influence of electronic media on children's health is given. The exposure to different media is estimated with special reference to the situation in Germany. The impact on violence and aggressive behavior, on sexuality, on physical activity, obesity and nutrition, on substance use and abuse and addiction, on anxiety, depression, irregular sleep, and attention deficits, on cognition, language and reading, creativity is discussed. Although some of the results reported are still in question, there is no doubt that television and other electronic media negatively influence children's mental and somatic well-being. They have fundamentally changed the life of children and expose them to a powerful experiment with unpredictable and possibly irreversible outcome.

Introduction

On September 12, 2006, 110 teachers, psychologists, children's authors and other experts call in a letter to the editor of the Daily Telegraph on the British Government to act to prevent the death of childhood. The group writes:

…we are deeply concerned at the escalating incidence of childhood depression and children's behavioral and developmental conditions… .

Since children's brains are still developing, they cannot adjust – as full-grown adults can – to the effects of ever more rapid technological and cultural change. They still need what developing human beings have always needed, including real food (as opposed to processed “junk”), real play (as opposed to sedentary, screen-based entertainment), first-hand experience of the world they live in and regular interaction with the real-life significant adults in their lives.

They also need time. In a fast-moving hyper-competitive culture, today's children are expected to cope with an ever-earlier start to formal schoolwork and an overly academic test-driven primary curriculum. They are pushed by market forces to act and dress like mini-adults and exposed via the electronic media to material which would have been considered unsuitable for children even in the very recent past.

They conclude:

…This is a complex socio-cultural problem to which there is no simple solution, … .

Today children's lives differ vastly from those of 25 years ago, especially due to the technical advances in many fields. Personal computers were then just coming on the market and had not appeared in schools. The internet was available only to scientists. Laptops, cell phones, and handheld electronic devices were things of the future. All of these – as well as the ubiquitous television screen – are now considered to be indispensable by many families and schools. The question arises: To what extent is virtual reality an adequate substitute for a disappearing natural environment?

Section snippets

Exposure

The Shell Youth Study, conducted in 2006, interviewed over 2500 adolescents aged 12–25 years old and presented data on the leisure time activities of this population (Hurrelmann et al., 2006). A list of 18 activities was presented, and the young people interviewed were asked to name up to five activities, which were their main leisure time activities. Computer games (20%), viewing videos (26%), watching television (58%) and internet surfing (38%) were named most frequently. By cluster analysis

Effects

As a society, we perform on our children a vast and uncontrolled experiment, exposing them already as infants and toddlers to home environments that are saturated with electronic media. We should try to understand what we are doing and what the consequences are.

Developmental psychology states that many younger children cannot discriminate between what they see and what is real. There have been studies documenting some pro-social and educational benefits from television viewing (Friedrich and

Violence and aggressive behavior

The effect of television on aggressiveness and violence is a very intensively studied subject, but opinions are not uniform. There is consistent evidence for that violent imagery in television, film and video, and computer games have substantial short-term effects on arousal, thoughts, and emotions, increasing the likelihood of aggressive or fearful behavior in younger children, especially in boys. The evidence becomes inconsistent when older children and teenagers and long-term outcomes for

Sexuality

There is good scientific reason to think that television may be a key contributor to early sexual activity. Sexual behavior is strongly influenced by culture, and television is an integral part of teen culture. In television, sexual messages are commonplace. At the present time there exist four studies examining the relation between early onset of sexual intercourse and television viewing, and there are numerous studies which illustrate television's powerful influence on teenagers’ sexual

Physical activity, obesity, nutrition

Sitting long time in front of a screen leaves less time for physical activity and playing. Television viewing affects both fatness and fitness, and multiple studies point to television viewing as one cause of childhood obesity. Two primary mechanisms for this relation have been suggested: reduced energy expenditure from displacement of physical activity and increased dietary energy intake, either during viewing or as a result of food advertising. For example, the US National Health Examination

Substance use and abuse, addiction

Heavy-television viewers exhibit five symptoms of dependency – two more than necessary to arrive at a clinical diagnosis of addiction. These include: (1) using television as a sedative; (2) indiscriminate viewing; (3) feeling loss of control while viewing; (4) feeling angry with oneself for watching too much; (5) inability to stop watching; and (6) feeling miserable when kept from watching.

It is obvious that the multibillion dollars which the tobacco and alcohol industries use every year to

Anxiety, depression, irregular sleep, attention deficits, suicide

Three percent of German children indicate to become anxious while watching television (Feierabend and Rathgeb, 2006). An exploratory study examined the heart rates and skin temperatures of 18 preschool children while they viewed two clips of everyday children's television program. The measurements were made in a day care setting, an environment designed to mimic the real world of children's television viewing. The study found a significant effect of exposure to the cartoon showing violence,

Cognition, language, reading, creativity

Early cognitive development is inextricably linked with physical, emotional, and social development. All grow out of early relationships with family and care-givers. Relationships with parents are of primary importance. Zimmermann and Christakis (2005) studied cognitive performance of 6-year old children from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth controlling for parental cognitive stimulation through early childhood, maternal education, and IQ. Reading recognition, reading comprehension and

Discussion

Television and other electronic media have changed the life of children fundamentally. Changing our children's world in such short period of time as our generation has exposed them to a powerful experiment with unpredictable and possibly irreversible outcome. There is no doubt that electronic media influence negatively children's mental and somatic well-being. The review shows both positive and negative effects, however apparently the negative influences are by far outweighing.

The supposed

References (41)

  • D.R. Anderson et al.

    Estimates of young children's time with television: a methodological comparison of parent reports with time-lapse video home observation

    Child Dev.

    (1985)
  • M. Bar-on

    Current topic: the effects of television on child health: implications and recommendations

    Arch. Dis. Child.

    (2000)
  • J.D. Brown et al.

    Sexy media matter: exposure to sexual content in music, movies, television, and magazines predicts black and white adolescents’ sexual behavior

    Pediatrics

    (2006)
  • D.A. Christakis et al.

    Early television exposure and subsequent attentional problems in children

    Pediatrics

    (2004)
  • R.L. Collins et al.

    Watching sex on television predicts adolescent initiation of sexual behavior

    Pediatrics

    (2004)
  • Currie, C., Roberts, C., Morgan, A., Smith, R., Settertobulte, W., Samdal, O., Barnekow Rasmussen, V. (Eds.), 2004....
  • W.H. Dietz et al.

    Do we fatten our children at the television set? Obesity and television viewing in children and adolescents

    Pediatrics

    (1985)
  • P.L. Ellickson et al.

    Does alcohol advertising promote adolescent drinking? Results from a longitudinal assessment

    Addiction

    (2005)
  • Feierabend, S., Klinger, W., 2001. Kim-Studie 2000: Kinder und Medien/Computer und Internet Eine Basisuntersuchung zum...
  • S. Feierabend et al.

    Was Kinder sehen. Eine Analyse der Fernsehnutzung Drei-bis 13-Jähriger 2004

    Media Perspektiven.

    (2005)

    • Cited by (38)

    • The Association Between Electronic Media and Emotional and Behavioral Problems in Late Childhood

      2017, Academic Pediatrics

    • Say "GDNT": Frequency of adolescent texting at night

      2015, Sleep Health

    • Are sleep education programs successful? The case for improved and consistent research efforts

      2012, Sleep Medicine Reviews
      Citation Excerpt :

      If this is true then, knowledge and intent to change behaviour are both as important and the assumption that delivering knowledge will result in this behavioural intent is therefore affected by the individual’s attitude and readiness to change. Take, for example, the sleep hygiene domain of technology in the bedroom its reported intrusion on sleep and subsequent relationship to poor sleep in this age group.52 Whether an adolescent decides to change their media usage would depend on their understanding of the effects of the behaviour, their attitude to their current behaviour, their intent and motivation to change, the consideration of its importance in their lives and their readiness to change it.

    • Children, Adolescents, and the Media:. Health Effects.

      2012, Pediatric Clinics of North America
      Citation Excerpt :

      Although no recent studies have been found involving TV or movies, major publicity now surrounds suicides precipitated by Internet bullying.371,372 Excessive media use may also be a marker for depression373 and has been associated with increased psychological distress in children and preteens.374–378 Although much of this article has focused on research emphasizing the deleterious consequences of inappropriate and excessive media use, it is also critical to acknowledge the many positive roles media can play in children's healthy development (Fig. 15).

    • The relationships between sex, age, geography and time in bed in adolescents: A meta-analysis of data from 23 countries

      2010, Sleep Medicine Reviews
      Citation Excerpt :

      It has been shown that media usage including television, mobile phone use and computer games prior to sleep onset not only displaces sleep time and delays sleep onset60 but may also contribute to physiological arousal and alertness.62 It is known that adolescents use media such as this at bedtime with media usage increasing in older children.63 It is plausible that where parents reported sleep onset times,53 media usage continued later into the night resulting in an underestimation of sleep onset latency.64

    • YouthWellTech: A Global Remote Co-Design Sprint for Youth Mental Health Technology

      2024, arXiv
    View all citing articles on Scopus
    View full text
    Copyright © 2007 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.