Digital Media and Autism Spectrum Disorders: Review of Evidence, Theoretical Concerns, and Opportunities for Intervention.
Rebecca Lane, Jenny Radesky
PMID 30973425WHAT IT FOUND
Screen time duration often looks similar between children with ASD and typically developing school-aged children, but content, bedtime use, and calming routines may matter more.
Counsel families on shared use, limits, and teaching kids to resist sticky apps.
Key findings
01Overall screen media duration showed no difference between children with ASD and typically developing peers in several cited samples.
02In a Thai cohort of young children, mean age 2.5 years, children with ASD watched television more per day and began watching an average of 6 months earlier than typically developing controls.
03Bedtime media use was associated with sleep problems in children with ASD, and poor sleep patterns have been linked to future challenging daytime behaviors.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for OTsWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
This is a narrative review, not a systematic review or original study, and it does not report a search method or how studies were selected. The practical suggestions are expert recommendations, not interventions tested in the paper. The evidence is mostly about television and video games, while the paper says newer mobile and interactive media are under-studied. Sleep and sedentary time findings are associations from cited studies, not proof that changing media use will improve sleep, obesity, or behavior. No study cited here shows that early media use causes ASD. The video modeling example involved two 5-year-old boys, so it cannot be generalized to other children.
Declared interests
The authors state they have no financial or other conflicts of interest to disclose.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read this as evidence that screen time causes autism or that limiting media will improve symptoms. The paper says no studies have definitively linked early media use to onset of ASD, and its suggestions are expert recommendations, not tested interventions.