A study by Common Sense Media and the University of Southern California found that a third of parents said phones interrupted conversations and 28 percent said they disrupted meals.
Dr Bex Lewis, Senior Lecturer in Digital Marketing and author of Raising Children in a Digital Age told Premier's News Hour that sometimes there is scaremongering involved in these studies:
"I think there's a huge amount of stuff in the media about screen time which is actually causing concerns about screen time. it's self-creating."
"We need to look at what people are doing on it. I think there's going to be a lot of battles if parents are being told all the time 'reduce your screen time, reduce your children's screen time'. Whereas I would go much more for a 'talk about how you're using it' [approach], talk about if you've got concerns that someone is over-using it but Matt Hancock (the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care) is talking about introducing a new law on screen time time and I'm just not sure that's ever going to work because people are different."
"Talk to children about what they're actually doing online and see if you've got any concerns. Don't focus so much on the time, talk to them about what they're doing, try and demonstrate that you understand that it's positive and that you're not necessarily trying to limit it and then I think the children will open up much more and be prepared to talk to you, rather than maybe what parents see as 'strangers on the internet', but actually mostly it's their friends".
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