Digital Screen Media Use, Movement Behaviors, and Child Health

This chapter summarizes the associations between children’s digital screen media use (DSMU) and their health, within the 24-h movement behavior framework (physical activities, sedentary behaviors, sleep), provides recommendations for healthy DSMU, and highlights future research directions. Key concepts include behavior displacement, combined associations, and DSMU context and content. Displacement examples include more DSMU decreasing time for healthier behaviors (e.g., physical activity or sleep) or replacing reading books and magazines with DSMU alternatives (e.g., texting, social media). How DSMU affects the relationships between various combinations of movement behaviors and children’s health is largely unknown. Total DSMU is most frequently studied, but a deeper understanding of all movement behaviors requires examining the content and context of DSMUs. Insufficiently examining context and content inhibits a fulsome understanding of the health impact of child DSMU within a 24-h movement paradigm. Measurement limitations include overreliance on self- or proxy-report measures. Preliminary evidence may suggest that high DSMU contributes to an unhealthy movement behavior profile, but DSMU could also contribute to a healthy movement behavior profile (e.g., active video gaming, goal setting apps). Whether and how much DSMU can be part of a healthy combination of physical activities, sedentary behaviors, and sleep requires further study.