More on Toddlers, Touchscreens and Learning

In the cover story of this month’s Atlantic magazine, writer Hanna Rosin plunges into the sensitive and scintillating topic of parenting via the iPad.  Memorably titled, The Touch-Screen Generation, the article describes how many middle-class parents feel “pinched,” caught between being dazzled by the multitude of easy-to-use apps that engage even very young children and fearful that too much time with these screen-based devices could spell harm. “Technological competence and sophistication have not, for parents, translated into comfort and ease,” Rosin writes.  

Just as the Atlantic magazine arrived, the March issue of the ZERO TO THREE journal was released with nearly the entire volume devoted to “Media and Technology in the Lives of Infants and Toddlers.”  I was asked to write one of the pieces, and I decided to focus on the looming question of how electronic media may be affecting language development. 

By zooming in on a key moment in children’s language development – those months just before and just after a child turns 24 months old – my aim was to try to make sense of the small but growing pile of experimental research that scientists have brought us so far.  Digging into the research can pivot us away from a position of fear – an entirely understandable stance given how fast media has become part of young children’s lives – and hopefully toward a more assured, critical yet curious view of what to appreciate and what to avoid.

First, though, let me give you a taste of Rosin’s piece, which is well worth the read. With enchanting prose, Rosin writes from first-hand experience about what it is like to raise a child in today’s middle-to-upper-income households:

Not that long ago, there was only the television, which theoretically could be kept in the parents’ bedroom or locked behind a cabinet. Now there are smartphones and iPads, which wash up in the domestic clutter alongside keys and gum and stray hair ties. “Mom, everyone has technology but me!” my 4-year-old son sometimes wails. And why shouldn’t he feel entitled? In the same span of time it took him to learn how to say that sentence, thousands of kids’ apps have been developed—the majority aimed at preschoolers like him. To us (his parents, I mean), American childhood has undergone a somewhat alarming transformation in a very short time. But to him, it has always been possible to do so many things with the swipe of a finger, to have hundreds of games packed into a gadget the same size as Goodnight Moon.

What the technology means for low-income and minority parents is an unexplored question in Rosin’s piece, as it is in most of the “iPad kid” coverage around the country.  It’s a topic begging to be considered. Yesterday, for example, I was one of the guests on NPR’s radio show, Tell Me More, to talk about the ideas in Rosin’s article. The other in-studio guest was an African American single mom who suggested, in our off-air conversation as we were packing up, that screen media was viewed as a critical communication and information tool for many parents and children in predominantly black neighborhoods of Washington, D.C.

In my ZERO TO THREE article, I use data and insights from about 20 peer-reviewed studies on how electronic media affects children’s word learning and other aspects of language development. (The research is still heavily tilted toward studies of videos and TV, but a couple of reports – the newest – examine interactive media.)

“Science is pointing to the complex interplay between the content on the screen, the context surrounding the watching or playing, and the developmental needs of the child,” I wrote.  Hard and fast rules about the quantity of “screen time” – an increasingly uttered and yet increasingly useless phrase — are not easily distilled from what the research tells us so far.  Instead, on a broad level, I am still seeing signs that focusing on content, context (which should include questions on the use of time) and the individual child continues to be a helpful framework for considering media use with young kids.

(For those who aren’t yet sick of hearing me talk about the Three C’s, you can learn more from my book, (regrettably!) titled Screen Time.)

The ZERO TO THREE article is only available to subscribers, so here are a few insights related to the article’s focus on language development for the very young. I’ve bulleted those that have been useful to me, as a mother and researcher, and that I hope can be useful to parents, teachers and caregivers of toddlers as well:

·      One study showed that parents give videos too much credit for new vocabulary words that their children have learned during these “language explosion” years of 2 and 3 years old. Yet even having parents teach children words directly, without the aid of video, is no guarantee that children will actually learn them.

·      Research is mixed on whether children can learn words from video alone before age 2. While two studies show no evidence that this is possible, another two showed toddlers learning words from video demonstrations around 18 months and 21 months of age.

·      By 21 months, children may be able to learn from recorded video of their mothers teaching them new words.  But younger than that, even with their mothers doing the teaching, word learning via recorded video appears to be difficult.

·      Adult-directed TV – essentially, screen media that is not designed to be understood by young children – is associated with negative impact on children’s language growth and development in several studies that have tracked children over time.  In addition, background TV, which is similar to adult-directed TV, appears to reduce the amount of language interaction that parents have with their children.

·      One experimental study that used a touch-based interface showed that children at 2 ½ and 3 years old showed signs of learning more from an interactive game than from non-interactive video. The study was not focused on language development, however. Instead it examined whether children could transfer information from the screen to real life as they played a game of hide and seek. I wrote a bit more about this study in a 2011 article for Slate, Can Your Preschooler Learn Anything from an iPad App?

The other articles in the ZERO TO THREE journal touch on a few of the same studies.  And honestly, reading through all of them at once can feel a little redundant. But they also raise new, provocative and sometimes conflicting ideas about how to consider media use with young children. 

A giant in the media-studies world –  Daniel R. Anderson –  and his colleague Katherine G. Hanson review decades of research on TV and toddlers.

A group of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania provide findings from a national survey of nearly 300 parents with children from birth to age 3, with data primarily focused on TV and DVD viewing. 

Researchers from Vanderbilt University examine issues of social interaction via the media, encouraging parents to support children’s learning with “active mediation” and watching together. 

“Toddlers and Touch Screens,” a piece by researchers from the University of Wisconsin and Hollins University, examines the thin but growing base of research on touchscreens with such young children, noting that “interactive screens do hold potential for early learning.”

The last piece in the series, by researchers from the University of Washington and University of Maryland, examines how race and culture play a role and includes some new data on popular TV programs, like Dora the Explorer, and how often they are viewed by different ethnic groups. (Interestingly, Sesame Street tops Dora among Latinos.)

All together, the pieces paint a complicated picture of what we know so far. Clearly there’s lots more to learn about what, how and under what circumstances the littlest members of this touchscreen generation are learning from the media around them. Given how quickly digital media is becoming integrated into their lives, it’s time for researchers and educators (and translators like me) to get cracking.