Young Children's screen habits: Identifying child and family contributors

Abstract

Screen devices are an integral part of many young children's lives but less is known about how child and parent/family factors contribute to young children's screen habits. Our study examined the contribution of child and family demographic and behavioral factors for Chinese children's weekday screen time, weekend screen time, daily frequency of using five devices, and purpose of screen device use. We collected baseline and follow-up data from parents of 255 children at a preschool in Beijing with an interval of 3 months (9/2021 and 12/2021; M = 4.41 years, SD = 0.80 at Follow-Up; Boys: 54.9%). Multiple regression analyses with the four outcome variables against six child-level and eight parent/family-level factors revealed that parent/family-level factors accounted for far more variance (10.1%–32.5%) than child-level factors (3.6%–5.0%) in predicting the outcome variables (βs = 0.19, p < .01 to .38, p < .001). Of all the variables, number of screen devices at home and frequency of the parent-child co-used screen devices were the only two factors that were most robust and significantly predicted all four outcome variables. Furthermore, different aspects of children's screen habits were related to overlapping and unique child and parent/family factors. To improve children's screen habits, interventions need to address the number of devices at home and the practice of parent-child co-using screen devices.