According to studies, due to the increased usage of smartphones, young children can probably face challenges in their physical growth, and adults can often experience various health issues, like severe headaches, nausea, weak eyesight, and other health problems. We must make some efforts to reduce our and our children's screen time and turn off our devices after a short period.

Damages Caused By Overuse Of Smartphones

Physical Damages:

• Eye Strain: Excessive screen time can lead to various eye-related issues, such as dryness, redness, discomfort, and headaches.
• Neck and Back Pain: Using smartphones while sitting can lead to bad body postures. This leads to neck and back pain over time.
• Strain Injuries: Too much texting and typing causes strain on our muscles and joints, especially those of fingers, wrists and thumb.
• Sleep Disturbance: A smartphone’s screen emits blue light which can often disturb our melatonin production, resulting in insomnia or disturbed sleep.
• Headaches and Migraines: Due to poor eyesight, extended screen time can lead to severe headaches and even long-term migraines.

Impact on Mental and Physical Wellbeing

FOMO: Constant use of smartphones results in fear of missing out. This leads to added anxiety and stress and a constant thought of being updated.

Social Media Addiction: Social media addiction makes a person too involved in the virtual world and unaware of their real surroundings. This can often cause physical and emotional damage to us, self-esteem issues in particular.

Setting Screen Time Limits and Downtime

It is very important to understand that our kids require both virtual as well as non-virtual environments for their physical and mental well-being. As parents, we must set boundaries and limits for our kids for everything they use and get exposed to. Setting screen time limits is very crucial to protect them from so many probable harms and irreversible damages. It is best to get help and assistance from a good parental control app. I find AirDroid Parental Control App the best for setting screen time limits for our kids’ or wards’ smartphones and other devices as well, both iOS and Android devices.

How AirDroid Parental Control App Helps

You can set a downtime for your kids which will work after 10 mins. You can also set time limits for certain apps or websites. Constant monitoring of mobile phone screens helps in knowing when your kid is using his/her phone. Their activities and other functions help us know for how long the smartphone is in use.

Parents can use the screen monitoring feature to know the activities being done on the phone as well as take immediate action if they see their children overusing their smartphones.

Other Beneficial features:

• Location History Tracking: Know where your children have been.
• Blocking Websites and Content: Block unwanted, explicit and age-restricted websites and content.
• Syncing Incoming Call Logs: Allows access to go through the incoming call logs and MSGs.
• Alerts: Identifies keywords and notifies parents of the MSGs received.
• One-way Audio: Helps in listening to the audio surrounding your children’s devices.