Parental use of routines, setting limits, and child screen use during COVID-19: findings from a large Canadian cohort study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background An increase in child screen time has been observed throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Home environment and parenting practices have been associated with child screen time. The purpose of this study was to examine associations between parental use of routines, limit setting, and child screen time during the (COVID-19) pandemic to inform harm-reducing strategies to limit the potential harms ensued by excessive screen use. Methods A cohort study was conducted in 700 healthy children (3,628 observations) aged 0–11 years though the TARGet Kids! COVID-19 Study of Children and Families in Toronto, Canada from May 2020-May 2021. The independent variables assessed were parent-reported use of routines and setting limits. Outcomes were parent-reported child daily screen time in minutes and whether the Canadian 24-Hour screen time guideline was met, defined as 0 for <1 years, 60 or less for 1–5 years, and 120 or less for >5 years. Linear and logistic mixed-effects models were fitted using repeated measures of independent variables and outcomes with a priori stratification by developmental stages (<3, 3–4.99, ≥5 years). Results A total of 700 children with 3,628 observations were included in this study [mean age = 5.5 (SD = 2.7, max = 11.9) years, female = 47.6%]. Mean change in child screen time before vs. during the pandemic was +51.1 min/day and level of parental use of routines and setting limits remained stable. Lower use of routines was associated with higher child screen time ( β = 4.0 min; 95% CI: 0.9, 7.1; p = 0.01) in ages ≥5 years and lower odds of meeting the screen time guideline in ages <3 years and ≥5 years (OR = 0.59; 95% CI: 0.38, 0.88; p = 0.01; OR = 0.76; 95% CI: 0.67, 0.87; p < 0.01). Lower use of limit setting was associated with higher child screen time and lower odds of meeting the screen time guideline in ages ≥5 years ( β = 3.8 min; 95% CI: 0.69, 6.48; p < 0.01; OR = 0.86; 95% CI: 0.78, 0.94; p < 0.01). Conclusions Lower parental use of routines and limits during the COVID-19 pandemic were associated with higher screen time and lower odds of meeting the screen time guideline among school-age children. Results may help inform strategies to promote healthy screen use in this age group.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".