Principal Findings
MINOR
This trial investigated the effect of the On the basis of GLMM, significant reduction in children’s screen time was observed in the intervention group as compared with the waitlist control group. Our findings are consistent with previous studies [In this study, the baseline screen time reported among children was twice as high as that reported in previous studies [Previously published studies of screen time reduction did not include any parental knowledge component, even though they might have been involved in the intervention. Increasing parental knowledge is the necessary first step for parents to initiate the subsequent actions to reduce their child’s screen time, such as restrictive viewing and supervision. In this study, the mother’s knowledge scores were significantly increased in the intervention group, indicating the importance of improving knowledge in interventions that aim for behavior change. However, improved knowledge alone is insufficient to produce screen time behavior change [In this study, we also found that mothers’ perception about the influence of screen time on their child’s well-being had significant group and time interaction. Our findings were consistent with previous observations in which parental perception about the necessity to limit a child’s screen time resulted in significantly less screen time among preschool children [Compared with a previous study, the A compelling finding from a recent study showed that Malaysian parents found it difficult to incorporate the reading culture into the daily lives of children [Next, the self-efficacy to increase physical activity among mothers was significantly high in the intervention group, albeit with just minor increase in mean scores. According to the observational learning construct, children are highly influenced by their parents’ uptake of physical activity. Thus, future interventions should promote physical activity for the whole family as compared with focusing solely on children. The minor increase in mean scores could be explained by the challenges for mothers to engage their children in physical activity outside the house owing to MCO during the pandemic. A systematic review found significant increase in self-efficacy to increase physical activity when interventions were conducted face to face and objective measures of physical activity accompanied by self-monitoring and performance feedback were reported [In addition, mothers in the intervention group showed significant reduction in leisure screen time by 70 minutes per day. Although most studies of child’s screen time stressed the importance of reducing parental screen time, there is a lack of RCTs that examine the actual reduction. Nevertheless, an RCT using mobile technology to control screen time among adults reported large reduction of 130 minutes within 2 weeks of intervention [In addition, the presence of digital devices in the child’s bedroom has been strongly associated with excessive screen time [