ST. LOUIS- By now, most of us are use to the common narrative that it is not good for kids to be exposed to enormous amounts of screen times because it would hurt a child's academic skills.
A new study was just done at Ohio State University says otherwise.
Doctor Rebecca Dor, a Director of Research at the Crane Center for Early Childhood Research, joined Total Information A.M. to discuss the university's findings that children's academic skills showed very little relation with media use.
According to Dor, the study was conducted with preschoolers and their families from primarily low income backgrounds around Ohio. They had the families fill out 'time diaries' and they filled out what the child did for every minute of the day.
"I think that is really sort of counter to the societal zeitgeist in the air that media use really overwhelmingly and uniformly is harmful for children," Dor said.
Dor said that they initially hypothesized that there would be at least some negative links with academic outcomes. However they found no relation whatsoever.
But, the university did find that too much screen time can have some negative effects on a child when it come to the social aspects of their life.
"We did find links with some social outcomes where at high levels of media use in particular children's screen time, quantity related to lower gains in these outcomes for social skills, social behavioral skills," Dor said.