Two-part question — Rising Screen Time Among Children

Children today spend far longer in front of screens than any previous generation. This affects their health in several ways, and the question of who should set limits deserves a careful answer.

The physical consequences come mainly from what screen time replaces. Hours spent sitting displace running, cycling and play, contributing to weight gain and weaker posture, while close focus on small screens is linked to rising rates of short-sightedness in children across East Asia. Sleep suffers as well, since both the light and the stimulating content delay the onset of sleep, and tired children learn poorly. Mentally, the picture is mixed but concerning: social platforms expose adolescents to relentless comparison with edited images of their peers, which research associates with anxiety and low self-worth, and the constant switching between short videos appears to erode sustained attention.

Responsibility, in my view, is shared, although parents must lead. They alone can set routines, keep bedrooms screen-free and model reasonable behaviour themselves. Yet expecting families to manage this unaided is unrealistic when applications are deliberately engineered to be difficult to put down. Schools should therefore teach digital habits and protect unplugged time during the day, while governments have the only real power over design: rules banning autoplay and targeted advertising for child accounts, and enforcing age limits, address the cause rather than the symptom.

In conclusion, heavy screen use harms children's fitness, sleep and emotional wellbeing. Parents should remain the primary decision-makers, but they need schools to reinforce good habits and regulators to restrain the features that make these products so hard to resist.