Causes and Impact of Gadgets Addiction in Children

Abstract

This study focuses on the hand held gadget addiction among children and its consequences on their performance academic, psychological, and physical health. Exploration of data paints a worrying trend of a decline in mean academic scores as the number of hours children spend on gadgets rises; mean academic scores are 85% for children using gadgets 1–2 hours per day and 58% for children using gadgets more than 5 hours per day. The same can be said of psychological health anxiety which also had its standardized score rise from 10.5 to 20.5 with added screen time. Besides, sleep period decreases sharply to 5.4 hours/day from 8.1 hours/day, physical activity decreases to 1.5 hours/week from 4.5 hours/week apart from increased BMI up to 33%. Gadget addiction also increases with age, and in children, it reaches 30% for 6–10 years, 45% for 11–14 years, and 60% for 15–17 years. Precisely, these results underline the necessity of practical developmental programs and activities concerning academic work, adequately balanced with physical activity and sleep needs for children of a particular age. In that regard, this paper demonstrates how addressing root causes and deploying specific interventions helps to reduce the negative impacts related to gadget addiction on children’s multiple domains of development.