A recent survey of school children in NSW showed that young people are spending on average 3 hours per day in front of a screen (computer or tv), the majority of which is computer time.
On weekdays about 44% of primary school and 61% of secondary school children spend more than the recommended 2 hours per day on recreation in front of a screen whereas on weekends it is 80% for primary and 85% for secondary school children .
Experts currently recommend 2 hours per day as the upper limit of healthy consumption of screen based content.
It is not surprising that approximately half of parents in this survey were unaware that the recommended screen time for young people is less than 2 hours. In fact, 20% of young children reported having a TV in their bedrooms and this increases to 40% of year ten students. While 13% of primary and 37% of highschool students stated that their parents never set rules on their TV and computer game use.
Once again, we see that with many of the issues contributing to the mental health problems of young people, parents are unwitting accomplices in this case due to a lack of information.
Read the executive summary of the survey here:
Ramesh, you are right about health issues but computers are need to today’s world.
You are right, the are needed but that should not be allowed to progress to excessive use at the expense of other things that are important for development, don’t you think?
Computers are important in today’s world. That said, excessive use of the same should be discouraged.