Associations of media use and early childhood development

There is a growing body of evidence showing that excessive early media use is detrimental to children's physical and mental health. As such, the World Health Organization guidelines suggest that screen time for infants should be limited to a maximum of one hour per day. However, with the growing ubiquity of digital media, it is thought that preschoolers are exposed to more than two hours of screen time. With the rapidly changing nature of digital media use, it is not yet clear how this is affecting different aspects of early childhood development. The evidence to date has been increasingly mixed. In this episode, we speak to medical student Clarissa Schwarzer who is doing her doctoral thesis on early childhood development and media use by children and mothers at the Leipzig Research Center for Civilization Diseases.