STATEN ISLAND: Babies exposed to greater levels of screen time suffer developmental delays in their first years, according to a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association of Pediatrics.

Researchers followed 7,097 mother-child pairs and tested the impact of one-year-olds spending time on iPads, tablets and other forms of technology on communication and problem-solving skills by the time they reached two to four years old.

The study recruited pregnant women from 50 obstetric clinics and hospitals in Japan between July 2013 and March 2017 before data analysis occurred on March 20, 2023. About 52% of the child participants were boys.

Children were broken up into four groups based on their amount of daily screen time: One group of under one hour daily, a second group between one and two hours, a third group of two to four hours and a fourth group of over four hours. Then, the children were assessed through questionnaires in several developmental areas, including communication skills, fine motor skills and problem-solving skills.

Just under 49% of children were reported to have less than one hour of screen time. About 30% had one to less than two hours, 18% had two to less than four hours and 4.1% had four or more hours.

By the age of two years old, children who experienced four or more hours of screen time were almost five times more likely to experience delays in communication compared to individuals with under one daily hour of screen time. That same group had nearly a three-times higher risk of having problem-solving issues and a more than two times greater risk of having social skills problems, according to the research.

"These findings suggest that domains of developmental delay should be considered separately in future discussions on screen time and child development," wrote the study authors.

The findings were slightly muted for the groups with less screen time. At the same age, the group that typically engaged with screens for one to two hours was 1.61 times more likely to have communication delays, while the two-to-four hour group was 2.04 times more likely.

The majority of those delays appeared to dissipate by age four, and the research does not explicitly show that screen time was the sole cause of the developmental problems. An expert told the New York Times the patterns could be described by lack of face-to-face interaction, which doesn't occur when a baby is watching a screen.

That interaction - a baby observing facial cues, tone and language - is key to a child's progression, the expert said.

Not allowing children to utilize technology, the authors of the latest study noted, is a near-impossibility. However, the researchers said new probes need to assess the difference in the effects of educational and entertainment-based screen time, which was not considered in the latest study.

"Because it is difficult to limit screen time in general in today's world of electronic devices, it may be beneficial to identify and limit the screen time aspects that are associated with developmental delays while taking advantage of the educational aspects," the authors wrote.

 - tns