No screen time for babies; only 1 hour for children under 5 – Health News



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LONDON (AP) – The World Health Organization (WHO) has released for the first time an indication of how much children under five should spend on the screen: not much, not at all for those under 1 year old.

The US health agency said Wednesday that children under the age of 5 should not spend more than an hour watching the screens each day – and that less is better.

The guidelines are somewhat similar to the advice of the American Academy of Pediatrics. This group recommends children under 18 months to avoid screens other than video chats. It states that parents of young children under the age of two should choose a "high-quality program" with educational value that can be viewed by a parent to help children understand what they see.

Some groups said that WHO's screen time guidelines did not take into account the potential benefits of digital media.

The WHO screen time board "focuses too much on the amount of screen time and ignores the content and context of use," said Andrew Przybylski, director of research at the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University. "All screen times are not created equal."

The Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health of Britain said the data available was too weak to allow its experts to set thresholds for the appropriate level of control time.

"Our research has shown that there is not enough solid evidence at this time to support the setting of a timeframe for selection," said Dr. Max Davie, Head of Health Improvement for Canada. middle School. "The limited selection timeframes proposed by WHO do not seem proportionate to the potential damage," he said.

The WHO did not elaborate on the potential damage caused by too long screen time, but said the guidelines – which also included recommendations for physical activity and sleep – were needed to combat increasing number of sedentary behaviors in the general population. He noted that physical inactivity was one of the major risk factors for death and contributed to the increase in obesity.

The agency said that infants under one year old should spend at least half an hour each day on the belly and that older children should do at least three hours of physical activity each day.

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