More and more you see young children been pushed in carriages or riding in a car, while playing video games and watching movies on hand-held, digital devices.

Yes, it keeps them entertained. It also helps with eye-hand coordination and manual dexterity.

Yet, pediatricians and other child development specialists are warning about the excessive viewing and playing of video and computer games at the expense of needed daily physical activities and developing social skills that come from interacting with other children in community activities.

The commonly held belief is that children need a minimum of 60 minutes of physical activities each day.

According to a number of recent studies, many school-age children spend hours each day on their home computers and hand-held devices in non-academic activities. One such study, in the journal Pediatrics, which was supported by the National Institutes of Health, looked at the value of active video games as a way of making a child more active. The outcome of this research is no surprise…no, children were no more active while playing an active video game.

Dr. Tom Baranowski,  a professor of pediatrics at the Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children’s Hospital commented,”If Mama brings a video game home, can she expect that her child will get more physical activity, and the answer is, as far as we can tell, no. Parents who want to have their kids to be more physically active should enroll their children in school-based sports teams, and other kinds of physical activities.”

Computers and hand-held devices are here to stay and that is not a bad thing. We just need to decide how much time each day is a reasonable amount of time for our children to spend in recreational use on these digital wonders.