Prospective Associations Between Early Childhood Screen Time Trajectories During the COVID-19 Pandemic and Accelerometer-Measured Physical Activity by Age 5
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose To examine associations between preschooler screen time trajectories and physical activity outcomes at age 5.5. Design A longitudinal cohort study of Canadian parents with preschoolers. Setting Data were collected in Nova Scotia, Canada, during the COVID-19 pandemic in Spring/Summer 2020 and 2021, and Summer/Fall 2022. Sample A community-based convenience sample of 315 parents of preschool-aged children (54% boys) was followed longitudinally when children were 3.5 (2020), 4.5 (2021), and 5.5 years old (2022). Methods Parent-reported screen time at 3.5, 4.5, and 5.5 years was used to estimate preschooler screen time trajectories. Using growth mixture modeling (GMM), three groups were identified: low (mean = 0.89 h/day, 23%), average (mean = 2.96 h/day, 56%), and high (mean = 6.42 h/day, 21%) screen time trajectory groups. At age 5.5, physical activity was directly assessed using accelerometers to capture light, moderate, and vigorous-intensity physical activity. Parents also reported child sex, family configuration, and educational attainment. Results Children in the high screen time trajectory group engaged in significantly less light-intensity physical activity ( b = −29.98, P < .05) compared to children in the average screen time trajectory. No significant differences were observed between the low and average screen time trajectory groups for light-intensity physical activity. Additionally, no significant differences in moderate or vigorous-intensity physical activity were observed between the screen time trajectory groups. Conclusions Higher screen time in preschoolers is associated with reduced engagement in light-intensity physical activity. These findings highlight the importance of monitoring screen time to ensure that children have opportunities to engage in light-intensity physical activities such as active and outdoor play. Limiting early childhood screen time may support healthier physical activity patterns and promote early childhood development.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".