{"title":"Television, Children's Obesity Risk and Mental Well-being: Lessons from the UK Digital Switchover","authors":"Adrian Nieto Castro, M. Suhrcke","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3750819","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3750819","url":null,"abstract":"We examine the effect of screen-based activities on obesity and mental well-being for children, exploiting exogenous variation in the entry date of the digital television transition in the UK. The digital transition increased the number of available free television channels from 5 to 40, leading to an increase in television viewing time. Our results show that one additional year with access to digital television signal increases BMI z-scores by 0.159 standard deviations and the mental health total difficulties score by 2.13% among children. Underlying the net effects appears to be a decrease in physical activity among children, while neither eating habits nor personal views about self-appearance seem to play a signicant role.","PeriodicalId":377697,"journal":{"name":"MedRN: Child Psychiatry (Topic)","volume":"46 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114535987","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}