FITeens Toolkit

34 American Academy of Pediatrics (2001) established that time spent watching television should not exceed 2 hours per day in children and adolescents, aged 5 to 17 years old. Subsequently, the 24-hour motion recommendations, developed by Tremblay et al. (2016), also supported these recommendations of a maximum of 2 hours of screen time per day . However, they qualified that they were not only alluding to television but also to the rest of technological screen media. Likewise, these authors emphasised that these recommendations referred to recreational screen time (time dedicated to screen technology media that did not refer to school or work). This nuance could be because recreational screen time is dispensable and, therefore, can take time away from other healthy behaviours such as physical activity and sleep. Recently, the World Health Organisation (Bull et al., 2020), has pointed out that screen time should be limited, although they did not establish recommendations. However, active screen time , such as talking on the phone while walking, is even associated with health benefits , as light activity is performed simultaneously. Prolonged sitting and, especially the excessive use of different screen technological media, has been associated with numerous negative health consequences in young people such as increased overweight and obesity , stress , and anxiety , as well as lower academic performance , among others (Lissak, 2018). Despite these detrimental effects, recent studies that are evaluating different screen technology media in children and adolescents show alarming figures. For example, a recent study conducted in Spain, in a sample of 2,021 young people aged between 12 and 17 years old, revealed that adolescents spend between 6 hours and 12 minutes per day (Simón et al., 2019), using their cell phone, being it the most used screen technological medium in all academic years. In general terms, boys seem to make more use of video games, while girls use the computer and the cell phone more. Screen time tends to be higher on weekends than on weekdays.