<![CDATA[Excessive, unsupervised gadget use in early childhood may impair development, and many young Indonesian children already use mobile phones; sensory play has been proposed to reduce this reliance by meeting children's sensory needs directly. To examine, in an exploratory single-site pilot study, the association between sensory play practice and gadget use duration in children aged 1-2 years at PMB Wanti Medan. Cross-sectional design, 80 mother-child pairs (simple random sampling from 100 registered mothers, no missing data). Sensory play was scored from a 5-item scale (range 5-15; alpha = .734) and categorized as Rarely (5–7), Sometimes (8–11), or Frequently (12–15); gadget use duration was a single self-reported item categorized as Low (<1h/day), Moderate (1–2h/day), or High (>2h/day), for which no multi-item reliability could be computed. Most children showed frequent sensory play (65.0%) and low gadget use (68.75%). The continuous sensory-play score was significantly and inversely associated with gadget-use category (Spearman's rho = -0.772, 95% CI -0.848 to -0.665, p < .001); the coefficient computed on both variables' categorical codes was higher (rho = -0.917) but is reported only as a sensitivity check, since categorizing a continuous score can inflate correlations. A Harman's single-factor test (unrotated PCA of the five sensory-play items plus the gadget-use category) found one factor explained 54.3% of combined variance, suggesting common-method variance may account for much of this association. More frequent sensory play was associated with shorter gadget use duration in this single-site sample; given the unmeasured confounders and common-method variance detected above, this is a hypothesis for future research, not a basis for health-promotion advice.]]>
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