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Playing video games may make it harder for some children to pay attention in school, a new study suggests.
Watching too much TV has been linked to attention problems in children but few studies have looked for a similar effect for video games.
In Monday's issue of the journal Pediatrics, U.S. researchers report that children who exceeded the two hours per day of screen time recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics were 1.5 to two times more likely to be considered above average in attention problems by their teachers compared with children who met the guideline.
The researchers followed a group of 1,323 children in Grades 3 to 5 and 210 college students. For the children, parents helped log TV and gaming time over a year. The college students filled in reports on their TV and video game exposure and attention problems.
Teachers rated the children on school performance, aggressive behaviour and attention problems.
“In just one year, we would see attention problems in the classroom getting worse related to how much time kids are in front of television and video games,” said study co-author Douglas Gentile, an associate professor of psychology at Iowa State.
While the researchers did take into account earlier attention problems and gender, none of the participants were formally diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD.
Screen-time limits proposed
“These studies demonstrate that the risk could be reduced if parents followed the recommendation of the AAP to limit children’s exposure to television and video games to no more than two hours per day,” Gentile and his colleagues concluded.
“Furthermore, there are theoretical reasons to believe that slower-paced educational, nonviolent content is less likely to cause attention problems, but more studies on this issue are especially needed.”
The study cannot determine if using electronic media itself causes reduced attention, since other factors may also contribute that were not considered in the study, the researchers acknowledged in calling for longer-term studies.
For example, some children may stay up late gaming which leads to attention problems from lack of sleep, or the screen team may mean children fail to get enough exercise, said Judith Wiener, a professor of school and clinical child psychology at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in Toronto.
A study earlier this year by the Kaiser Family Foundation found kids aged eight to 18 devote almost eight hours on average per day to entertainment media, or about 53 hours per week.
CBC News
