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Record W4413946418 · doi:10.1556/2006.2025.00064

Early childhood screen use and symptoms of problematic media use

2025· article· en· W4413946418 on OpenAlex
Caroline Fitzpatrick, Marie-Andrée Binet, Daniel Tornaim Spritzer, Gabriel Arantes Tiraboschi, Sarah E. Domoff, Gabrielle Garon‐Carrier, Hermano Tavares

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.
aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Behavioral Addictions · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicChild Development and Digital Technology
Canadian institutionsUniversité de Sherbrooke
FundersSocial Sciences and Humanities Research CouncilSocial Sciences and Humanities Research Council of CanadaCanadian Institutes of Health ResearchResearch Nova Scotia
KeywordsScreen timeMedia usePsychologyDevelopmental psychologyCoronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)Early childhoodMedicinePhysical activitySocial psychology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Objective: To assess associations between early childhood screen time trajectories and problematic media use scores by age 5.5. Methods: The present study is based on a prospective, community-based convenience sample of 315 parents of preschoolers, from Canada studied at the ages of 3.5 (2020), 4.5 (2021), and 5.5 (2022) during the Covid-19 pandemic. Parent-reported screen use at the ages of 3.5, 4.5, and 5.5 was used to estimate preschooler screen use trajectories. Using latent growth modeling, we identified low (mean = 0.9 h/day, 23%), average (mean = 3.0 h/day, 56%), and high (mean = 6.38 h/day, 21%) screen time trajectories. Parents reported child problematic media using the Problematic Media Use Measure - Short Form (PMUM-SF). Results: A multiple regression, adjusted for child sex, effortful control and parent education and stress revealed that compared to children in the low screen time trajectory, children in the high screen time trajectory had higher problematic media use scores at age 5.5 (β = 0.378, p < 0.001). In addition, children in the average screen time trajectory scored higher than children in the low screen time trajectory (β = 0.229, p ≤ 0.001). Conclusion: Our findings suggest that higher screen use in early childhood is associated with an increased risk for the development of dysregulated media use, which can interfere with family functioning. As such, parents should be encouraged to follow screen time recommendations of ≤1 h/day for children between the ages of 2 and 5.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.129
Threshold uncertainty score0.255

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.001
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.032
GPT teacher head0.297
Teacher spread0.265 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it