The Los Angeles Times – Jessica Roy
“The American Academy of Pediatrics is catching up with the times. Back in 2011, it issued a policy called “Media Use By Children Younger Than 2 Years,” which recommended no more than two hours of screen time a day for kids older than 2, and discouraged any time at all in front of a screen for toddlers younger than that. It reaffirmed those guidelines in 2013. In the October issue of AAP News, released this week, the group acknowledged that that prescription was neither realistic nor necessary. “In a world where ‘screen time’ is becoming simply ‘time,’ our policies must evolve or become obsolete.” The academy in May convened a two-day symposium where researchers, educators and medical experts met to evaluate data to create an updated and more realistic set of guidelines for parents. A formally updated set of guidelines will come out in 2016. The current recommendation is that parents monitor and limit their children’s screen time, but there’s no magic number of maximum hours to which they should ascribe. Instead, parents should curate their children’s interactions with media and “co-view” what they’re doing.”(more)