DETROIT – For parents, managing their children’s screen time is part of the job. They worry not just how much time they’re spending on it, but what the screen time is doing to their bodies.
Doctors in Metro Detroit are sounding an alarm about the types of injuries they’re seeing in children because of screen time — injuries they don’t expect in children.
It’s one of the many challenges in being a parent in today’s society. You need your young child to sit still so you can complete a task, so you give them a screen, but doctors say what makes life easier in the moment is creating problems that you’ll have to deal with later.
Dr. Joshua Gatz, a pediatric sports medicine physician at Children’s Hospital of Michigan, is concerned with a trend he’s seeing in his practice with children and their physicality.
“We’re starting to see a lot of muscle ailments, soft tissue ailments from kids who are particularly inactive,” Gatz said. “We’re starting to see kinda muscle knots, muscle spasms — things that we might typically see in adults.”
Gatz said he’s seen kids in the ER after they’ve fallen asleep while looking at a tablet only to wake up and not be able to move their neck or their arm. It can lead to missed days of school and even physical therapy in pediatric patients.
“We’re starting to see these types of ailments where they’re having limited range of motion,” Gatz said. “They’re uncomfortable at school and it’s starting to affect their daily lives.”
“We’re seeing kids with difficulty with focus and attention, seeing many many kids with issues with visual tracking, which impacts your general functioning and particularly with reading,” said Donna Dotson, a senior physical therapist at Children’s Hospital of Michigan. “We’re seeing kids who have just delayed development, delayed walking skills, delayed crawling skills, delay in sitting ability, delays in communication skills, kids with increased anxiety because of screens. These are all areas that are impacted by an excessive amount of screen time.”
She said she’s been working in physical therapy for 30 years and has been seeing these issues more recently.
“The screen time for our population, in general, has been steadily increasing over the years, but the COVID lockdown kinda pushed everybody over the cliff where everyone got in the habit of relying on screens and spending a lot of time on screens,” Dotson said. “Since then we’re really seeing just a lot of kids, most kids, frankly that are getting too much screen time and so it’s become such a crisis and it’s really frightening the effects that we’re seeing so that we’re now having this discussion about screens with every family that we see its something that we talk about.”
Dotson said many families don’t realize screens are even a problem, and not only that, some have forgotten what to do when there’s not a screen involved and how developmentally appropriate it is for kids to be kids.
“For example, when, kids come here. I don’t want them sitting quietly, well-behaved in the waiting room on a screen, they need to be trying to climb on the furniture and the parent saying ‘No, you can’t do that, you have to sit down,’ and trying to run around and ‘No, you can’t run in here. you have to walk. You have to stay here,’” Dotson said. “Those are practice opportunities because children’s development doesn’t happen because time passed, it happens because they had a lot of practice. Those are natural opportunities in the absence of screens to practice self-control and following directions and sitting still and paying attention to the world around you.”
Medical professionals are asking parents more specific questions about their kids’ use of screens and providing information on how much screen time children should have, but most of all — they’re encouraging more play.
“In Michigan, it can be a little difficult when it’s cold but even still finding potential youth sports in the winter, things like that to stay active,” Gatz said. “We kinda recommend even just 30 minutes six times a week. One thing every night. Even just going out for a walk around the block with the family, trying to get away from those screen times, just being active.”
Dr. Riffney Widner, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital of Michigan, is concerned with the number of children she’s treating for bone and muscle ailments. Ailments she said are usually “older people problems.”
“Especially around the spring and summer when they starting to become more active, they start complaining about their knees and their backs and their necks because they’re having a lot of pain because they spend so much time looking at screens,” Widner said. “Usually you’ll see this with your older populations because they typically live more sedentary lifestyles.”
The effect of too much screen time is not only physical. Local psychologists are also seeing the effects in children mentally.
“I see them to be more isolated socially. They’re by themselves on the screen, earphones in, so you can’t interact,” Widner said. “The kids are often by themselves. The social skills is issue two, because if you’re not able to interact because you’re all into whatever you’re doing, opportunities to be social and to learn are not there.”
So what do parents need to do?
“We need to get back to doing things as a family and as a group because it has to be replaced with something else. So board games. What happened to family game night? Playing cards, Monopoly, Chutes and Ladders, whatever you have we need to go back and get those things that we stopped buying because we had out screens,” Widner said. “Even implementing family screen time so those family-friendly movies and then having discussions set a good example for the parents to put the phone down during mealtime and make sure you’re doing what you’re asking your kid to do to talk to and be engaged, that means you actually have to talk about things or play with them.”
Children’s Hospital of Michigan has a pamphlet for parents that has guidelines about screen time. It can be read below.