Bangladeshi Young Children’s Smartphone Use: Status and Parents’ Awareness

Abstract

Nowadays the tendency for smartphone use among children is noticeable and day by day this tendency is increasing at an alarming rate. The aim of this study was to explore the status of Bangladeshi young children’s smartphone use and parents’ awareness of young children’s smartphone uses in terms of the American Academy of Paediatrics (AAP) guidelines. The study employed a mixed-methods research approach and adopted purposive sampling. The data were collected through an online mixed questionnaire from 83 parents who owned smartphones and whose children were between 0 and 5 years old. The findings show that 44% of children spent more than 1 hour on the smartphone screen which is higher than the screen time recommended by the AAP guidelines. It was found that 65% parents gave their children smartphones to entertain them, while 62.3% for learning purposes, 42.9% for keeping their children calm, 37.7% for feeding their children, and 23.4% for keeping their children busy during their work. It is noteworthy that 78% parents found different kinds of developmental problems in their children, while the rest 22% found no negative effects on their children. The study reveals a significant gap in parental awareness and knowledge regarding the AAP guidelines on children’s screen use. The results show that 75.6% of parents did not know about the guidelines for children’s screen use recommended by the AAP. Although they did not know the recommended guidelines, 81.1% of the parents had taken various steps to control their children’s excessive smartphone usage and the steps were effective in reducing children’s excessive smartphone use. As most of the parents were found unaware of the AAP guidelines for screen use, there is a need for increasing proper awareness among parents to mitigate the negative effects of children’s smartphone use.