An ORIGINS study aims to find out more about family screen habits to help provide clearer, more realistic advice about how to make the most of rapidly evolving technology, while avoiding the drawbacks.
Today’s parents are the first generation to raise children who have access to mobile screen technologies like smartphones and tablets almost as soon as they are born – and many are struggling as they try to figure out how to manage this brave new world.
Australian guidelines recommend digital media use should be avoided by children under the age of two years and limited to less than 60 minutes per day for children aged two to five years, yet the evidence suggests children not only start engaging with screens at much younger ages than this, but dramatically exceed the suggested limits.
Recent data revealed the majority of young Australian children spend an estimated 22 hours a week on screens, compared to just six hours a week playing outside.
ORIGINS Project co-director Professor Desiree Silva said the early use of digital technology was resulting in less free play, unsupervised viewing, sleep disruption, addictive behaviours, obesity, speech and language delay, and difficulties around social interaction and self-regulation.
“Parents are confused around management of digital technology, with education policy calling for increased use of technology to support learning, and public health policy calling for no screens for very young children and very limited use by slightly older young children,” Professor Silva said.
“The recommendations haven’t kept up with wide and easy use of mobile touchscreen devices, and are based around more traditional technology like television and desktop computers.”
Professor Silva said it was important to understand more about family use and views about mobile technology devices, including their impact on bonding and parenting from infancy – knowledge which could then be used to inform more robust guidelines.
“It is also important to understand what mobile technology is replacing, which I suspect is our connectedness to nature,” she said.
An ORIGINS sub-study being carried out by Curtin University’s Professor Leon Straker and Dr Juliana Zabatiero, in collaboration with Professor Silva, will interview parents about their family screen habits, along with what they think about the use of mobile touchscreen devices by young children.
A small number of parents signed up to a bigger ORIGINS study looking at the impacts of technology use on early development will be asked how many and what kind of screen devices they have in their homes, what a typical week of screen device use looks like for them and their family, why they use them, and how they manage that use.
“The information we gather from these interviews will inform public policy, future research, and the development of realistic, co-designed interventions aimed at helping parents to better guide their young children’s use of screen technology,” Professor Silva said.
“Within the larger study we’re looking at screen time and impacts on things like behaviour, emotional, motor, language and cognitive development,” Professor Silva said.
“This smaller study will involve interviews with parents that allow us to dig more deeply into how families use electronic devices, particularly mobile screen technology. It will go into much more detail.
ORIGINS project grows in leaps and bounds
It’s been a big two years for the collaborative ORIGINS Project, a longitudinal birth cohort study which launched in 2017 with plans to recruit and follow the progress of 10,000 Perth babies and families over a decade.
The largest study of its kind in Australia, ORIGINS is a partnership between The Kids and the Joondalup Health Campus, aimed at reducing the rising epidemic of non-communicable diseases by providing a healthy start to life. ORIGINS researchers are collecting detailed information about babies and their families to understand more about how the early environment influences the risk of diseases like asthma, allergies, diabetes and obesity.
So far almost 2,000 families have been recruited, and more than 1,500 ORIGINS babies have been born. Of those, almost 500 have attended their one-year clinic
Unique among other birth cohort studies, ORIGINS currently has 600 fathers participating in the research. The project has ensured active community involvement, holding dozens of events bringing study participants and community members together with paediatricians and health nurses to monitor and discuss childhood health.
Milestones so far include:
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More than 250 local, national and international researchers, clinicians and consumers
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15 sub-projects have been launched off the main project, looking at multiple aspects of child and family health and development
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12 active ORIGINS Research Interest Groups have been launched, to facilitate collaboration, provide expertise, develop nested sub-projects, and support students
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More than 3,000,000 data points collected from participant samples and questionnaires
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Wide media coverage – more than 30 media items with an audience reach more than two million people
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ORIGINS Forum held in August 2018 attracted more than 160 attendees, generating collaborative ideas for future ORIGINS Project research and sub-projects
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Annual family fun day attracted almost 200 attendees
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Researchers have presented at more than 30 conferences and community events
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10 research papers have been published from the data and knowledge obtained from the project
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A book chapter called ‘The ORIGINS Project’ was published in the international book
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Pre-emptive Medicine: Public Health Aspects of Developmental Origins of Health and Disease
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Co-Director Prof Susan Prescott won the Independent Book Publishers 2018 Gold Medal in the health category for her book Secret Life. She was also a finalist in Forward Review's Indie Book of the Year.