![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
On kids and screens
Aug. 15th, 2022 10:01 amI was recently pointed at this UNICEF piece about how young kids shouldn't use screens. And I was curious about the research, none of which the piece actually links to. So I went digging.
First up, Research has shown that screen time inhibits young children’s ability to read faces. Googling for that, leads to a variety of articles. All of which lead to this research. Which was carried out on pre-teens. And consisted of giving them a test, taking half of them off to camp without screens, and then giving them all the test when they got back. The important bit is this graph from the results:
And looking at this you can see that (a) the difference in screen-reading ability before the intervention was almost 2 whole points. And the difference after one spent a week without screens and one didn't was...0.4 points. So, both groups got better from doing the test twice, and the difference between groups was absolutely negligible. Clearly this is solid evidence that you should ban babies from screens at once!
Secondly, Patricia Kuhl is one of the world’s leading brain scientists and runs experiments with more than 4,000 babies each year. “What we’ve discovered is that little babies, under a year old, do not learn from a machine,”. She definitely said that. And she's definitely a world-leading scientist. Importantly, though, what she was talking about was language acquisition, specifically learning phonemes, the building blocks of spoken words. I absolutely agree that given "Spend half an hour chatting to your baby, or stick them in front of a screen", the former is going to do a lot more for their development. But unless you're doing that constantly, her evidence shows nothing about whether it's okay for kids to chill with some animated music in-between those times.
One gets the feeling that someone has gone "Well, if they spend all of their time staring at screens, and are forbidden from looking at another human, or moving around at all, then that would be bad. Best to ensure they don't look at them at all. Let's find some bad research and take things out of context to scare people."
My experience, from two kids who have both had tablets since they were old enough to take an interest in such things, is that they love them when they're tired, in much the same way that adults love TV when they're knackered at the end of the day. But given a bit of time to recharge while watching something fun* they are then totally up for doing more active things again. And obviously, with young kids, you keep an eye on what they're up to. When Gideon goes from happily watching a few videos to skipping every 7 seconds it means he's too tired to really enjoy anything, and it's time for sleep.
Frankly, the guidance from the UK's experts in what's good for kids (The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health) totally avoids setting limits on screen time, and says that there is no good evidence that screen time is bad for kids, except directly before bedtime, when it might stop them sleeping. You can read the research here, and a pretty good writeup of it here. The three things to watch out for are:
* I'm particularly fond of this one, which Gideon acts along with delightfully.
First up, Research has shown that screen time inhibits young children’s ability to read faces. Googling for that, leads to a variety of articles. All of which lead to this research. Which was carried out on pre-teens. And consisted of giving them a test, taking half of them off to camp without screens, and then giving them all the test when they got back. The important bit is this graph from the results:
And looking at this you can see that (a) the difference in screen-reading ability before the intervention was almost 2 whole points. And the difference after one spent a week without screens and one didn't was...0.4 points. So, both groups got better from doing the test twice, and the difference between groups was absolutely negligible. Clearly this is solid evidence that you should ban babies from screens at once!
Secondly, Patricia Kuhl is one of the world’s leading brain scientists and runs experiments with more than 4,000 babies each year. “What we’ve discovered is that little babies, under a year old, do not learn from a machine,”. She definitely said that. And she's definitely a world-leading scientist. Importantly, though, what she was talking about was language acquisition, specifically learning phonemes, the building blocks of spoken words. I absolutely agree that given "Spend half an hour chatting to your baby, or stick them in front of a screen", the former is going to do a lot more for their development. But unless you're doing that constantly, her evidence shows nothing about whether it's okay for kids to chill with some animated music in-between those times.
One gets the feeling that someone has gone "Well, if they spend all of their time staring at screens, and are forbidden from looking at another human, or moving around at all, then that would be bad. Best to ensure they don't look at them at all. Let's find some bad research and take things out of context to scare people."
My experience, from two kids who have both had tablets since they were old enough to take an interest in such things, is that they love them when they're tired, in much the same way that adults love TV when they're knackered at the end of the day. But given a bit of time to recharge while watching something fun* they are then totally up for doing more active things again. And obviously, with young kids, you keep an eye on what they're up to. When Gideon goes from happily watching a few videos to skipping every 7 seconds it means he's too tired to really enjoy anything, and it's time for sleep.
Frankly, the guidance from the UK's experts in what's good for kids (The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health) totally avoids setting limits on screen time, and says that there is no good evidence that screen time is bad for kids, except directly before bedtime, when it might stop them sleeping. You can read the research here, and a pretty good writeup of it here. The three things to watch out for are:
- The act of screen time indirectly encouraging sedentary behaviour, i.e. displacing physical activity
- The content of screen time directly influencing young people, e.g. through advertising, desensitisation to violence or sexually explicit material, or exposure to bullying
- The act of screen time replacing socialising or learning time, which might lead to social isolation.
* I'm particularly fond of this one, which Gideon acts along with delightfully.
