The relationship between screen addiction and self-care abilities in early childhood

The aim of this research is to determine whether the sociodemographic conditions of the families of 48-72 months old children trigger screen addiction in children and whether the developing addiction regresses the self-care skills that the child should gain at that age. The population of this research consists of 200 children aged 48-72 months. The scales were applied to parents and teachers of these 200 children. The data of the study were reached by using "Socio-demographic Information Form", "Preschool Children (36-72 months) Self Care Skills Scale-Teacher" and "Problematic Media Use Measure". Kurtosis and skewness values were taken as basis to control the normal distribution of the data. To analyse the data, T-Test and one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) were used for independent samples from parametric tests.When variance analysis results were significant, Tukey test were used in order tofind which variance created the difference. In cases where Tukey test did not work, LSD Test was used. IBM SPSS Statistic 28.0 program was used inanalysis of data, and all analyses were tested at significance level of .05. According to the findings of this research, of the children in the sample, 88 (44%) are girls and 112 (56%) are boys. 98 of these children are in the age group of 48-60 months and 102 of them are in the age group of 60-72 months. Of the children in the study, 88 (44%) are 0-6 months, 45 (22.5%) 1-2 years, 15 (7.5%) 2-3 years, a total of 148 ( 74%) are reported to have received pre-school education. A negative relationship was found between the problematic media use scale and the self-care skills scale-teacher form. This situation reveals that excessive use of media tools negatively affects self-care skills. Key words: Screen addiction, preschool education, self-care skills