Investigating the Role of Family and Shortcomings in Interventions to Reduce Children's Use of Digital Media

Children’s screen time is increasing and has devastating effects on various aspects of their development and health. This systematic review study was conducted to investigate the role of family and shortcomings in interventions to reduce children's use of digital media. PsycNet, ScienceDirect, Medline, PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, ISC, SID and IranDoc were searched from 2000 to 2019. All research studies that were RCT with children under age 12 and aimed to reduce ST in children were eligible to study. 18 of them were eligible and were included in the review. Most of the strategies used were behavioral and cognitive, and family factors, including communication between family members and child- parent relationship as an important and influential factors in managing child behavior were largely neglected across the articles reviewed. Awareness of parents about the negative consequences of children's over- use of digital devices and training them to perform alternative and joint activities as two main elements can make interventions be more effective than when they focus only on teaching skills to children. In addition, involving parents in interventions is more effective when other influential factors such as child and parent characteristics, quality of parent-child interaction, patterns of parenting behaviors, parenting styles and influencing factors in home environment should also be considered.