Staring at screens probably isn’t good for babies, but it’s a hard habit to curb, reports the San Jose Mercury News.
While the facts are sobering and pediatricians have long warned about curbing screen time, it can still be hard to pull off in the real world, especially at a time when kindergarteners attend computer labs and many kids are expected to do school assignments on a computer.
For the record, the American Academy of Pediatrics has set firm guidelines for media use. For children younger than 18 months, they recommend avoiding all screens, except video-chatting. They add that parents of children 18 to 24 months of age who want to introduce digital media should choose high-quality programming and watch it with their children. Ages 2 to 5 years should be limited to 1 hour per day. For all children, they advise holding the line on media free zones, such as the dinner table and the bedroom, and making sure that the screens are not keeping kids from sleeping, eating and playing.
Sadly, although tech moguls, such as Steve Jobs, famously limited his own children’s access to technology, the rest of us often fall under the thrall of the screen.
Read the rest at www.mercurynews.com
