Recent news stories regarding young children and technology use have caused a stir in the media and the blogosphere. While there are many anecdotes about children ages 2 and under using smartphones and tablets with more fluency than their parents, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recently reiterated a long-standing warning that children of this young age should spend very limited amounts of time in front of screens – including TVs, computers, and “educational games.” It’s certainly understandable that this recommendation is confusing to parents, as there is no shortage of toddler (and even infant!) targeted videos, games, and applications. Moreover, these products are often marketed as educational, or at the very least, helpful in some way to a child’s well being.
Keeping in mind that there is no conclusive evidence that occasional screen use is necessarily harmful to young children, there are strong findings from research in cognitive development that support the AAP’s strong suggestions to keep kids under 2 as screen-free as possible.
In a 2010 Psychological Science study examining the effectiveness of a popular “word learning” DVD marketed towards infants “12 months and up,” DeLoache and colleagues found that 12- and 18-month old children who viewed the DVD several times a week for 4 weeks did not show any new word learning. These results did not differ significantly between children who watched the DVD with a parent, on their own, or a no-video control condition. However, in a fourth condition, in which parents were given a list of the 25 words purported to be “taught” in the DVD and told to “teach [their] child these words in any way that seem[ed] natural to [them],” children showed significantly more word learning. Another interesting finding was that parents who liked the DVD tended to overestimate the amount of learning that occurred.
These findings corroborate with well-documented research in early word learning that children first acquire and understand the words they hear most from their parents (e.g., Huttenlocher, Haight, Bryk, Seltzer, & Lyons, 1991). More recent findings even indicate that videos are insufficient to teach categories of words such as verbs, which seem to only show learning from direct human interaction (Roseberry, Hirsh-Pasek, Parish-Morris, & Golinkoff, 2011). Given these results, as well as the “vocabulary explosion” that takes place between the ages of 18 to 24 months – during which kids have been consistently shown to acquire as many as 10 new words a day (McMurray, 2007) – the combined information strongly indicates that the AAP’s warning should be taken seriously.
Picture by Wayan Vota
References
- American Academy of Pediatrics (2011). Babies and Toddlers Should Learn from Play, not Screens. Retrieved November 14, 2011 from http://www.aap.org/pressroom/mediaunder2.pdf.
- Carey, B. (2011) Parents Urged Again to Limit TV for Youngest. New York Times. Retrieved November 2, 2011 from http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/19/health/19babies.html?_r=1&ref=us.
- Huttenlocher, J., Haight, W., Bryk, A., Seltzer, M., & Lyons, T. (1991). Early vocabulary growth: relation to language input and gender. Developmental Psychology, 27, 236-248.
- McMurray, B. (2007). Defusing the Vocabulary Explosion. Science, 317 (5838), 631.
- Roseberry, S., Hirsh-Pasek, K., Parish-Morris, J., & Golinkoff, R. M. (2009). Live action: Can young children learn verbs from video? Child Development, 80(5), 1360-1375.
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DeLoache, J., Chiong, C., Sherman, K., Islam, N., Vanderborght, M., Troseth, G.L., Strouse, G.A., &O’Doherty, K. (2010). Do Babies Learn From Baby Media? Psychological Science, 21(11), 1570-1574.
