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The Executive Director for Child and Family International, Ms. Clara Puni Nyamesem, has charged parents to refrain from exposing their children to prolong screen media use most especially the young children below the ages of zero through eight (0 – 8) years old.

According to her, unregulated children’s screen media use such as smartphone, tablet, laptops, computers, console games, TV and many others have a huge negative impact on children’s health.

Ms. Clara Puni Nyamesem who doubles as Child and Family Life Specialist in an exclusive interview further stated that, research has shown busy parents often adopt these screen media as screen nanny to calm their wards down at the expense of human interaction, a behaviour which must be discouraged.

Visual related issue, language developmental delays, childhood and adulthood aggression, childhood obesity and at the extreme end; it leads to autistic-like behavior.

According to her, the benefit children derive from screen media depend on their age, contents, program design and hours spend consuming screen media.  

“It creates an avenue for the children to access all sort of developmentally inappropriate content such as excessive sharp lighting and colors in violent cartoon and games, pornographic materials and adult related content in our social and traditional media. Aside this, it also affords them the opportunity to consume culturally unaccepted content in our secular music videos and some local movies which is lace with nudity, violence and insult”.

She mentioned parental co-viewing, adult-child interaction, storing telling (anasesem), reading to children, as some of the effective activities that support healthy childhood development.