How useful is Screen Time?
Have you ever been in a restaurant with a wailing toddler? Maybe you might have rejoiced when his parents whipped out a device to pacify their unhappy child?
Or have you been at a gathering where adults are enjoying an uninterrupted chat while their children are left in a corner with smart phones? Such is the ubiquity of touch screen devices amongst families in Singapore these days.
Being portable, fascinating, and engaging, it is no wonder that it is viewed as the “ultimate babysitter”; pulled out to quieten a fussy child, or to keep a toddler entertained while mummy gets a few things done.
With the penetration of these smart phones and tablets comes the rise of educational apps. These apps boast the capabilities to make children smarter through games that target language, maths, science, you name it.
However, are touch screen devices all that they are made out to be? Or are there dangers that lurk beneath its glossy facade?
No Evidence for Benefits of Apps
Despite all their hoo-hahs, there is actually little evidence to support any brain-boosting capabilities. A recent review by the Joan Ganz Cooney Centre was conducted, studying nearly two hundred apps aimed at toddlers and preschoolers.
The researchers concluded that these apps yielded little educational potential besides academic concepts like ABCS and Colours. Most of their contents are not derived from established curricula, and are created without consultation with educators nor developmental experts. In addition, what promises to hook the children turned out to be distractors, negatively impacting the social interaction between adults and child during shared use.
Screen Time and Attention
The bright flashing lights. The rapidly changing scenes. The animated sound effects. It is no wonder that children can remained glued for hours if left to their own devices (pun every bit intended). However, when hurled back into the monotony of day-to-day life, these children may have a problem staying on tasks.
As a result, children exposed to a high level of screen time may have a lower tolerance of slower-paced activities like reading and drawing. This could have a bearing on the dramatic rise in ADHD diagnosis rate (a 43% rise between 2003 and 2011).
Although there is a lack of research regarding the link between touch screen devices and ADHD, ample research exists, tying other forms of screen time to attention. It wouldn’t take a stretch of imagination to see how touch screen may have similar effects as well.
Screen Time and Language
Now we get to the contentious part; do screen time promote language?
In an article published in Clinical Pediatrics, researchers found that screen time was negatively correlated with language development in Hispanic infant and toddlers. Children who watched over 2 hours of television per day had increased odds of low communication scores.
What about those educational programs like Baby Einstein? Sadly, their claims are not evidence-based, and in fact research seems to support the contrary. In a study conducted in 2010, it was found that Baby Einstein videos have no effect on the vocabulary growth of children between the age of 12 to 24 months.
Even worse, the same researchers found that earlier exposure was, in fact, related to lower scores on a measure of general vocabulary knowledge.
These result make sense if you consider child development. Due to their limited memory processing abilities, children are less able to focus on more than one thing at a time. Children younger than age 2 are thus more likely to learn and remember information from a live presentation than they are from a video.
This means that infants are more likely to learn words for novel objects if a speaker is looking at an object rather than attending elsewhere or looking directly at the child.
Unfortunately, in TV programs and apps, the on-screen character often looks directly at the children while signing the name for the object. At the same time, a voice-over presents the label, resulting in a less than ideal learning experience.
So if children need to see an item while hearing its name, what about programs that show an image of the object while labelling it?
Even though children have been shown to learn words from such situations, it remains that children still learn and retain far more when a physical adult presented and named an object for them.
This is likely due to their lower memory processing power which prevents them from transferring their learning from 2D contexts to 3D.
Unfortunately, with little evidence corroborating the efficacy of infant-directed DVD without parental intervention, it seems like nothing can replace a parent, at least for now.
Screen Time and Sleep
Not only does screen time have a direct impact on language and cognitive development, it may be doing so indirectly as well. In a study that was published in Nature, researchers from the UK has found a significant association between the frequency of touchscreen use and sleep quantity. To get a sense of the magnitude, every additional hour of tablet use was linked to a reduction of 15.6 minutes in total sleep duration.
The researchers hypothesised that the content of media may be too stimulating, making it harder for children to fall asleep. Secondly, the bright blue light emitted by these devices may have a detrimental effect on melatonin secretion which affects one’s circadian rhythm. Lastly, young children with touchscreen devices in their bedroom may delay falling asleep in order to prolong their use of the touch screen.
Regardless of the reasons, the fact that screen time disrupts sleep has wider implications. For young children, sleep plays an integral role in neurodevelopment and synaptic plasticity. During sleep is when their learning is consolidated through synaptic formation and pruning. Therefore, a reduction in sleep duration may have a profound impact on cognitive development during this critical period of development.
Screen Time and Obesity
Unfortunately, just swiping their little hands does not burn enough calories to offset the wave of childhood obesity sweeping the globe. Since screen time is primarily a sedentary activity, increased use of devices likely displaces time for physical activity. As we all know, being sedentary is linked to obesity, and research seemed to support the case.
Screen Time is not All Bad
Despite the numerous findings vilifying the use of screens, screens can still have some value. In fact, reading apps when used together with an adult can offer some benefits.
Firstly, it gives a family instant access to a large library of books, directly from their homes. This is especially important for families with less resources or who do not live in the vicinity of a library.
When travelling, families do not have to lug along large number of books for their child’s reading pleasure.
And lastly, the distracting animations in e-books may be the only way an inattentive child would stay with a book. Using this as an inning, the parent can gradually ease the child into a habit of reading and thus cultivate their love for books.
However, to reap the benefits, parents need to be educated on how to correctly use reading apps. Instead of relegating the role to the app, parents should seek to actively engage the child with the content of the books through questions and comments.
Secondly, parents need to be more judicious in what and how they present it to their children. Parents need to learn how to select apps that has suitable and valuable content.
With the help of an involved parent, research has shown that education programs and apps can make a positive impact on a child’s language development.
Conclusion
Just like how a medicinal drug like morphine can be abused, touch screens can be misused when parents use it as a convenient babysitter. With the rise of touch-screen, some parents seem to think that they can afford to be less involved.
However, the opposite is likelier to be true. With so much content on the internet and screens, parents need to be hyper-vigilant to make ensure that only the beneficial content make it through to their children.
Only by learning to ward off its perils, can parents harness the best that technology has to offer.
