Indian Parents’ Vocational Inferences of Play and Communal Strategies to Regulate the Adverse Effects of Children’s Excessive Screen Time

Background: Since time immemorial, children’s intrinsic desire to immerse themselves in amusing, autonomous activities in vast, open spaces has engendered their holistic development through play. However, the steady decline in playgrounds has compelled children to seek solace in a digital landscape, which offers them a plethora of innovative play opportunities that “pushes them away from the outdoors and pull them indoors.” This infiltration of technology in urban households enhance children’s propensity to engage in media-centric activities due to their proclivity toward electronic devices. Consequently, the passive entertainment afforded by the dominance of digital culture predisposes children to inertia, insomnia, sedentary lifestyle diseases and public health issues like screen dependency disorders (SDD) and gaming disorders, which are officially recognized by organizations like the World Health Organization (WHO). This necessitates a conscious, synergetic effort by health practitioners, researchers and policy makers to ensure that children have access to safe and affordable spaces for active, outdoor play to counter the adverse effects of excessive screen time (EST). Methods: Therefore, this qualitative research aims at understanding how urban parents’ perspectives of play are governed by their sociocultural milieu and their respective professions by expounding their outlook on the relevance of play in a digital era. It also delineates the pivotal role of parents in curtailing the mediating role of discretionary screen time (DST) over children’s physical inactivity through semi-structured interviews of 13 mother-father dyads who reside in the metropolitan city of Bengaluru in Karnataka, India. Results and Conclusions: Findings from the “directed content analysis” revealed parents’ initiation of healthy movement behaviors during children’s formative years by employing “mediation tactics” and role modeling healthy screen habits like “digital detox” to regulate the aftermath of prolonged screen time on children’s psychosocial development