Asst Prof Tan highlighted that shared activities are especially important for younger children.
“If a child reads alone, the child is just learning a language. But when a child is reading with the parents, it is not just about the words on the pages,” she said.
“It is about the back-and-forth interaction, learning how to recognise facial expressions and emotions as they interact with their parents.”
If parents want to include devices in their children’s lives, they should not leave them alone with an iPad, for example, but sit down with their children and use it as an educational tool, said Asst Prof Tan.
While parents play the most critical role during infancy, healthy peer interaction becomes increasingly important as children grow older, she added.
FUTURE GOALS
Looking ahead, the research team plans to continue tracking the children into adulthood.
They aim to assess cognitive functioning, mental health outcomes such as anxiety and depression, and conduct further brain scans to understand why some children show greater resilience than others.
“Ultimately the aim is to see how children that improve differ from those that don’t,” said Asst Prof Tan, adding that future work could help shape interventions for children affected by early screen exposure.
The researchers are also expanding their focus beyond screen time alone, to examine how it interacts with other lifestyle factors such as sleep and physical activity.
“All the adverse outcomes that we are seeing in these adolescents are actually a combination of high screen time, low physical activity and insufficient sleep,” Asst Prof Tan said.
“We’re hoping that we will be able to design a comprehensive intervention that could guide people to address this in a more holistic manner.”