On kids and screens

[andrewducker]

I 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:

• 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.

Avoid those three, and you'll be just fine.

* I'm particularly fond of this one, which Gideon acts along with delightfully.

Comments

[aldabra]

It's a lot harder to avoid those things when they're older. K got a laptop towards the top of primary school, and now says that was much too early and she saw lots of things she shouldn't have seen. You can't do all the supervision, not as well as working and cooking and eating and sleeping, (especially if you have two!), and they have an instinct for which bits to do when you're not there.

Lock them down with parental controls now, because by the time you need to it'll be too late and they'll fight you over it. I gormlessly didn't get around to nobbling the TV before she discovered Cartoon Network; that also is something you want to head off in advance.

[andrewducker]

What was the harm from the Cartoon Network?

But yeah, general access to the internet for young kids is not a good idea. Sophia's not got web access at all (not that she can write yet), and the apps she's using mostly have age ratings. Netflix and Disney+ both do, and on YouTube they can both easily recognise the difference between videos aimed at me and ones aimed at them, and aren't interested in watching Dark Souls walkthroughs!

[aldabra]

Cartoon Network: OMG the hatter. You don't want to get home from work and have a choice between is-it-SpongeBob-on-CN and a screaming tantrum because you want to do something else. (Especially if it's augmented by a screaming tantrum if you try to do something else *quietly in a different room*...)

If there are things you don't want to be exposed to on a loud loop for eighteen months at a time you're much better off blocking them before they get discovered. They get discovered much earlier and more irreversibly than you would expect.

M, to small K: No, I haven't got CBeebies on my laptop.
K: Yes, Daddy, yes you have! It is under this "e" here! [Dives for Internet Explorer.]

[andrewducker]

Aaah. Not had that issue so far. Sophia has her own tablet, and after spending 9-5 in nursery I don't mind if she wants to watch whatever she likes on it when she gets in. (Currently Bluey season 3 and Octonauts)

[armiphlage]

I watched TV when I was a kid, and saw lots of things that I shouldn't have seen.
I read books when I was a kid, and read lots of things that I shouldn't have read.
I existed when I was a kid, and experienced lots of things that I shouldn't have experienced.

[anef]

Is your subtext "and it didn't harm me at all" or "people should have taken more care over what I was exposed to as a child"? Or something else that I have missed?

[armiphlage]

More "the medium is not the message", and the same concern about electronic tablets was likely brought up when clay tablets were introduced.

[cmcmck]

They went on and on for years when they first became a thing about how bad TV's were for kids on the same slender evidence and for many of the same 'reasons' and I wouldn't be surprised if they had also said the same thing about cinema with regard to an earlier generation and I know that printed books were considered deadly dangerous to the young (and to those of us of the female persuasion) after Herr Gutenberg had his good idea!

Having worked with both seriously disabled kids and young adults, I'm here to state just how valuable IT has been in those fields since it became a thing and I've been around long enough to be aware of both before and after!

[andrewducker]

Oh yeah, absolutely essential for quality of life in many cases!

I'm sure that when printed books came in people complained that people would no longer memorise poetry and would be ruined for life!

[mtbc]

My English teacher indeed had us memorize some poetry. As I recall, the principal cited benefit was that it would help to keep us sane should we be marooned on a desert island.

[anef]

Not just printed books - Socrates (I think) complained about it. And it was true, people no longer memorised long chunks of Homer.

[lilysea]

Good to know!

The other thing I feel people should take into account re kids and screens is that kids + screens can prevent harm - eg

if Kid A is using a screen and so the parent gets a break

but Kid B is never using a screen and so the frazzled/exhausted parent yells at them,

Kid A is better off.

There is A LOT of robust research on the danger of parents yelling/shouting on kids cortisol levels etc.

[andrewducker]

Absolutely. Adults need time off too!

[skington]

A friend of mine says that his 2-year-old knows numbers (I think he can count to 40-odd?) and some letters, as a result of needing to type in, first a numeric, and now an alphanumeric passphrase to unlock his iPad.

[andrewducker]

Gideon and Sophia definitely learned their earliest phrases from kids videos.

[booklectica]

That's good to know - we have ended up at the very lassaiz faire end of things, never having limited the girls' screen time apart from general encouragement to do other things too. We also don't check their phones or monitor what they're looking at. They're now 18 and 12, have worked out for themselves what they do and don't want to watch, and all seems fine so far.

[andrewducker]

I'm glad it's working out well. I'm slightly nervous about them bumping into the equivalent of Goatse when they're older. And rather more nervous about them bumping into Alt-Right conspiracy nonsense about how everything is the fault of uppity women/black people/muslims. But hopefully we'll be able to talk about things and work through that nonsense.

[calimac]

"The act of screen time indirectly encouraging sedentary behaviour, i.e. displacing physical activity"

Now I'm reminded of how my parents tried to get me to stop reading books all the time and go out and play occasionally. Same stuff goes around, whatever the technology.

[andrewducker]

I was thrown out into the garden regularly as a child. Against my protestations.

[symbioid]

I think calling everything in front of a computer "screen time" is a really bad take. To me it's the social networking aspect of it all that's harmful. Otherwise it's just TV and while people would whine about it, it wasn't nearly the panic as I was growing up (or maybe I'm wrong and the whole 'Don't let kids watch TV' was a bigger thing than I realized).

[mountainkiss]

Doing the ethics forms for "runs experiments with more than 4,000 babies each year" must take considerable work.

[andrewducker]

My understanding is that the babies are actually helping run the experiments.

Mostly they do the paperwork.