During the past 10 years, use of screen as in social media and video games has become one
of the most common leisure activities for children and adolescents. According to the
Swedish Internet Foundation, 94% of children in Sweden between ages 8 and 12 play
internet games every day. Male and female screen behaviours and habits differ. Boys tend
to play video games while girls are more active on social media. The general increase in
screen time among children and youth, as a time-consuming leisure activity has been a
puzzle to the adult world. Specifically, parents and professionals who work with children
and youth express concern for the effect that screen time may have for child and youth
development. Some research suggest that screen time in general and gaming in particular
is an educational and skills training activity. Other research has concerns that video
games can become a potentially pathological activity that interferes with everyday life
with risks of developing psychiatric disorders such as internet gaming disorder (IGD).
IGD is included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth
edition (DSM-5), as a condition necessitating further clinical experience and research
before inclusion as a formal disorder. The WHO, on the other hand, has included Gaming
Disorder in the International Classification of Diseases, eleventh revision (ICD-11), as
a formal diagnosis. Experiencing addictive problems as a child may pose threat for future
psychosocial development, including mental health and socioemotional development. In that
sense, child and youth mental health services need to put more efforts into developing
interventions that target children at risk to prevent the development of mental health
problems among children and youth. To date, there are no evaluated preventive programs
for child and youth with excessive screen time or problematic gaming in Sweden. Our
research group from Lund University and Region Skåne, with Emma Claesdotter-Knutsson (E
C-K) as a PI, has evaluated Relapse prevention (RP) as an individual treatment for
problematic gaming in a Random Controlled trial (RCT) among children 12-18 years old in a
Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (CAP) setting. This was one of the first treatment
studies for children with problematic gaming in Europe. Although we discovered that the
individual treatment of children and youth has promising effect on their gaming, we also
found that that there were important pieces lacking when providing treatment for children
with problematic gaming. The most prominent one was the lack of family, including
parents, involvement in the treatment. Children and their development need to be seen
from a system perspective - children develop in interaction with their
environment/family. For children, parents are the closest socializing agents in their
environment who with their parenting behaviours and practices pave the way for child
developmental transitions. In that sense, the development of certain behaviours, such as
gaming and excessive screen use may, at least to some extent, be related to family
factors. It is then possible that child problematic screen time/gaming is not only
attributed to the child itself, but to the family as a system. Therefore, we believe that
parents need to be included in the preventive interventions targeting children and their
families. Instead of only focusing on the child, changing the family environment,
including parent-child interactions at home, may pose significant changes in the child's
screen behaviour. This is a recognized logic from other family interventions such as
Strengthening families program targeting families with children with behavioural problems
and Cool Kids program targeting families with children with anxiety. In fact, parents
whose children have undergone the RP-treatment in our project state that they need to and
want to be involved in the child's treatment.
With this as a background, the overarching goal with this project is to develop and
evaluate an easily accessible family program targeting children and adolescents with
problematic gaming and excessive screen use.
