Screen time robs average toddler of hearing 1,000 words spoken by adult a day
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
My daughter is still young (2.5 years old), but I know that I'll let her play video games when she wants as long as it's as part of other activities in the day and that the games are ones that develop either her logic, creativity or motor skills.
Similarly, watching a quality show like bluey, or watching a full movie end to finish like Totoro in Japanese are watching activities I support, whereas watching some crap cartoon made to sell toys is not.
Most cringe episodes are the first and last two of the season, but the slice of life in the middle are more often than not golden.
But yeah, creating a curated library and not leaving it to chance would probably be a good idea.
And MLP is indeed a quite good show, fans ranging from Miley Cyrus to Gabe Newell.
Also I don't know how is it considered bad if characters are lovable (MLP has 50+ different, but lovable characters by design), or that if objects around her (clothes, mugs, toys, other merch) make her feel good?
Some, like Transformers, were essentially toys that were given shows.
Even Sesame Street, a PBS (public broadcast) show, still has significant toy tie-ins -- anyone remember the Tickle Me Elmo crazy years ago? My 2 year old has a big-ass plush Cookie Monster.
Video games won't develop motor skills, unless you find some tough games which require very fast hand-eye coordination at the child's level. Even then it's going to be very limited in comparison to e.g. drawing, throwing and catching a ball or playing a musical instrument. Creativity from video games is something I find even harder to believe. Logic is about the only thing that games manage to convey, but at that age, logic is weird. Toddlers can't reason well, and can't explain themselves.
A tablet or a phone is like candy to children. Be careful.
> Creativity from video games is something I find even harder to believe. Logic is about the only thing that games manage to convey,
Kids playing Minecraft probably aren't building computers.
[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095679761665030...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187705092...
[3] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235367249_More_Than...
But you've got a motley set of studies. The first study says "After they played a driving or first-person-shooter video game for 5 or 10 hr, their visuomotor control improved significantly. In contrast, non–action gamers showed no such improvement after they played a nonaction video game" (emphasis mine). Not toddler's games.
The 2nd article is not only about FPS, but it is very low quality and relies on self report without a control group.
The third article finds a correlation between strategic video games and self-reported problem solving skills and self-reported academic performance, while showing a negative influence from FPS on problem solving.
So I'd say: nothing has been proven, certainly not about toddler's games.
During my studies my team tried to replicate some studies showing improved test scores after playing games like Tetris; we tried it on several schools and found literally no effect whatsoever.
I personally do believe screen time ought to be limited to some extent, but that’s only because I believe being outside is healthy, not because screen time itself is bad.
She also watches every now and then "C'est pas sorcier", a french documentary series for kids that's pretty advanced (go into details of biology etc.), on all sorts of topics (nature, science, food etc.). That's also a good way for her to experience some French as we live in the UK and her only source of French are talking to me, or to her grandmother on the phone.
Just to be clear she does plenty of other activities, we cook together (she has a children's chef knife and uses it to cut things like tofu, carrots etc.), she draws on paper, she sings and dance, goes to the swimming pool weekly etc.
As for video game, that's more for later as she does not have yet the skills for that but at a glance
- Logic : Puzzle games, things like incredible machines, but also management game like sim-city. - Creativity : Any sandbox game, the sims, minecraft, drawing game, sculpting game, animal crossing etc. - Motor skills: Platformers, fighting games...
Essentially any game that requires a lot of effort for little reward, as opposed to games that makes you touch something shiny and shower you in visual and auditive feedback.
"C'est pas socier" and "Numberblocks" are excellent.
It was this article with ptitdrogo
https://www.christian-staedter.com/guest-newsletter-theo-pti...
I'm kinda curious what happened to the earlier pros, like Idra, Huk, etc. I suppose time to do some detective work. :D
Single player games have one off purchases (unless you are playing trash games), so the requirement is to just have an enjoyable experience.
For some weird reason we couple all of this under "screen time" and "videogames" encompasses both multiplayer and singleplayer, which is heavily different.
I worry about apps / video games for children also stunting imagination. Yes, in a game like Minecraft you can build anything out of blocks, or with Photoshop draw anything. However, the entire 'universe of outcomes' is inherently bound to the mind(s) of the developers, compared with a bored kid who's possibilities are limited only by their own imagination. Children are therefore pressed to stretch and practice creativity. Its not a perfect analogy, but I'm reminded of the theme in the Matrix movies of bounded outcomes.
I personally think creativity through raw boredom - rather than directed distraction (especially through digital devices)- is essential to mental development.
Also, having boundaries and getting bored is great for creativity
And I'm not sure what videogames you play, but hand eye coordination needs to be really high. something that's also overlooked is the level of reflexes they develop. In new super mario bros U, initially I would need to say "now jump" with roughly a 6 seconds anticipation before the actual jumo, now my toddler can jump properly in the first few levels.
Give it toa 5 years old and they are nowehere close to being able to do what he can do, so he must have developed something.
Of course you give them hard games, it's the same reason why you give them veggies and not candies. You give healthy videogames, not the garbage that goes on tablet and phones.
Oh and regarding creativity, my children played videogames, then got bored. With mum, they built a super mario level using duplo blocks and proceeded to play using the action figures we have.
Something strongly overlooked, is the level of focus required to play hard videogames, so something they develop is, indeed, focus.
And decision making! There is so much to decide in a videogame, often rapidly.
All of this happens in the same room as me, to be clear (still working), so I can see when they get bored and it's time for a change. Also they don't have access to the games, so they have a single videogame at a time with one change per day, which a great natural way to enforce focusing and getting bored if playing excessively
Screen time for your child might buy you some free time, but is not a replacement for real interaction.
In 20, 30, 40 years I guarantee you will give anything to be able to go back and spend more time with your young child.
Children are not distractions from important work, they ARE the important work.
He plays happily by himself, and is always asking questions. People always compliment him on being well behaved, kind and very articulate.
It seems almost taboo to suggest it might be be something to do with the lack of screen time, but I can't help but think it plays a large role. I see how hard I struggle to deal with boredom and refrain from using my phone and I never want to inflict that onto a child.
What will you do regarding schools, have you thought about that? Normally I'm not a control freak, but I worry that our hard work protecting him from the negative effects of screen addiction will quickly be destroyed if he's put into an environment where every other kid has a phone and is addicted to it.
It's the phone of other kids, they will not give their phones away
If all of them will use phones and chat via them, not having one will be social isolation.
Truth be told I realise that this is a case where whatever you do, there will be consequences. I myself I don't really know how I'd approach that.
That’s giving me hope
*IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER THAT I AM NOT A PARENT* i cannot judge others for how they raise their children as i do not and will almost certainly never have any of my own, however i can still discuss the topic and raise concerns even with the understanding that i may be missing things and i am willing to accept that may indeed be the case
I’m more on the “quality of screen time” and “method of screen time” as my modifiable factors. Zero screen time seems (I cringe saying this) impossible.
Basically you don't use your phone near your child unless it's absolutely critical. That means - don't browse mindlessly, check social media, or news etc. Then all you have left is basically the occasional work related email that is urgent, which can probably be taken care of in mere seconds unless you need to action something.
A good thing to do anyway.
> Then all you have left is basically the occasional work related email that is urgent,
I tell clients I do not check email regularly. If something is urgent they can phone or text message.
It hasn't really been hard at all. He just gets involved in everything around the house. He helps cook and clean and look after his baby brother.
I'm going to be a father in a couple months and I'm observing most of my friends who did care about avoiding screens for their children give up partially on the idea because they've categorized it borderline impossible. I'm talking about parents who did deeply and seriously care about it prior having the kid.
Meanwhile I have two othwr friends who kinda got away with no screens. But i feel they do put a lot more effort for it.
So my take observing those samples: expectation management and be self-aware of how much sacrifice does it take.
If anyone has more adivice on this I'd appreciate too.
There's a plus side for us as well, since reading, doing hobbies, and being in closer touch with friends is what we would (in our unwarped-by-phone-addiction moments) rather be spending our time doing.
I think screen time is proxy for something else, maybe general parental attention. You can have plenty and watch TV, or have no screen time and no attention either.
A child's day is long and has very few responsibilities, there is plenty of time for attentive, creative playing even around an hour or two of screen time.
You don't need to think statistically, you need to parent.
So what? To a literal reading of Tom Sawyer, dead cats are a standard American toy. Might even help cure warts.
>You don't need to think statistically, you need to parent.
Indeed. Parent with the assumption that your child will become a statistic.
With a parent like that I'm sure they will.
Thanks for the judgement though
https://www.youtube.com/@msrachel
?
1. Whilst there IS good content on there. A lot of it is complete nonsense. cocomelon, paw patrol, baby shark, AI generated rubbish etc. and quite a lot of the games are terrible. Toddlers don't know the difference between what is good and what is bad. You cannot monitor them effectively because amazon provides access to all content by default. He would quite easily get through 20-30 apps/videos in one sitting. That's a lot of different content!
2. Instead of reading, playing with his lego, wooden blocks, trainset or doing puzzles, his goto became the tablet. He wanted it at all meal times, in the car, and before bed. If we didn't give it to him, he had a meltdown. So we ended up giving it to him as we didn't have time to deal with the meltdown. Before the tablet, he didn't really meltdown at all.
3. Whilst he communicates well and talks a lot for a 2 year old. When using the tablet, he would completely zone out... "Would you like to eat supper?" ... tumbleweed. That's not great and aligns with TFA.
4. Not sure if correlated because there are lots of other factors at play but his bedtimes became a nightmare. He wanted the tablet, when before we read books like Mog the Cat or similar. Instead of being content with Daddy singing Jelly on the Plate, he wanted the horrid video on the tablet.
5. We live in a lovely rural area in the UK and he stopped wanting to go outside to instead play with the tablet.
6. Again, not sure if correlated but he became more irritable and restless after using the tablet.
7. He would complain there is nothing to do despite the availabily of toys.
And so... One day we told him the computer was broken. Mummy sent it to the factory to get it repaired. And... It's still being repaired to this day.
The first day was hell but now he's stopped asking for it and he's back to his normal self.
Perhaps we'll introduce it again when he's a bit older.
I don't want to come across as evangelical about it, but it is the best decision I think we've made as parents.
Honestly don't understand parents who would swap the facade of "it shuts them up" when in reality you have kids who you can take to dinner and they'd happily just sit there with a coloring book vs the drama about how much charge they have left on their tablet and constantly having to tell them to put it down to eat.
Dunno starts to feel like a false economy where you're trading off acknowledging them elsewhere for a moment for every other interaction being amplified into drama mostly centered around the tablet, how much charge is on the tablet, when the tablet must be put down etc.
Eating out with my son is difficult because he cannot focus on something for more than a few minutes. I’m sure some kids would be content to sit and color for like 30mins but I don’t think it’s the norm at 2.
I feel a lot of our generation take the attitude that screen time didn't harm us (hey, we've done ok) which I'm not sold on - I wonder sometimes how I might have turned out if I didn't spend so much time on video games or messing around online as a kid.
But if we're sharing anecdotes:
- our (almost) 3 year old gets screen time(cartoons in the evening, just so I can cook dinner while my wife works), but speaks two languages fluently at this point, and understands when to switch between them.
- our friends 3 year old has zero screen time, very engaged parents, and knows like 5 words, babbles a lot otherwise. They've been for different consulatations about this and apparently it's completely normal, sometimes kids develop language skills a bit later and that's fine.
What I think is definitely related is parents giving their kids dummies after they turn one - I've seen kids as old as 3-4 years still using them, and I've heard about parents just doing it so "the kids stays quiet". It absolutely breaks my heart.
Banning candy for your kid is a more apt comparison, and that seems to be very ineffective to me.
This website claims their program has 5th graders succeeding at AP math: https://www.mentava.com/
Kids are capable of more than we give them credit for. Adults are incredibly vain and infantilize their children to preserve their adult egos. Hands on experience and self paced learning across contexts is the key to education success. Not our dilapidated social institutions and reductive philosophy like avoiding screen time. Thats vanity speaking.
My kids started with desktops, not phones, and with carefully chosen software - GCompris was the first thing I remember.
Boredom is often a good thing - it motivates you to find things to do.
He uses ipad for games/shows at least once every 2-3 days.
There is a clear selection bias especially on HN, where a lot of people are quite intelligent and educated. Our offspring will have the same learning traits.
I can see parents giving their child a screen because of the fact they need to distract the child for a few minutes while they do something.
Like, what came first? The screentime or the good behavior?
The same words and phrases get repeated and iterated over in varying orders and stresses in association with immediate touchable physical objects and executable actions.
A week of that would test higher for word|association retention than would a week of watching video with { words, words, words } streaming by non stop.
Yes, I do understand that there are videos and shows that are specifically designed to engage and teach young viewers: Playschool, Sesame Street etc .. but these require far more craft than goes into the vast sea of near AI generated pap that streams these days.
Humans are copy-machines. We copy each other. Toddlers and infants especially so. They don't learn by just hearing voices, they need to see how these sounds are made by a real human being with a real voice-box and real lips and real tongue, in which context they are used.
Have you ever noticed gesturing while talking to someone on the phone? That's because we constantly try to enrich the words we are making with more context.
All that is missing if toddlers are just looking at a screen. It's devastating for learning.
I would expect that cartoons make up a big part of the screen "diet" of these toddlers and cartoon characters noises are not "words spoken by an adult".
GP said studies, plural. I cannot confirm that. But the linked study is consistent with what I observed in my child when he was a toddler.
There's plenty of studies that show that.
If you don't have anything useful to contribute, please be silent. This is not Reddit.
Please do your own research next time.
> The review indicated that an increase in the amount of screen time and an early age of onset of viewing have negative effects on language development, with older age of onset of viewing showing some benefits. Video characteristics, content and co-viewing also influences language development. This study demonstrates that the negative influences of screen time appear to outweigh the positive influences.
I wonder if the problem is children's programming.
https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-97...
The problem of course lay with the parents. Not to mention they let her use a regular YT account, well her fathers to be exact and I found out my niece had bookmarked 18+ videos on YT...which I promptly deleted and installed YT kids only for her father to revert to regular YT...on which I then activated child mode or whatever it is.
But before school ages I socialized with them constantly. Built Legos, showed them SnapCircuits, read books, danced to music and used basic instruments, helped them with basic cooking like measure of ingredients.
It has nothing to do with screen and YouTube and everything to do with hands on practice across contexts.
Non-verbal, inept kids who did not get hands on mentorship have existed forever. There are more ignorant, inept parents in the world than geniuses. In the US only 14% of the public has more than a bachelors while polls suggest public believes it’s closer to 45%-50%
Like much of the world the majority in the US just aren’t that intelligent.
and don't tell me it's for the good of the child, if you really and truly believed that you'd call CPS. This feels like a 1-sided story from the perspective of a karen.
I think we already knew that "When you're watching a tablet you're not talking to people." - what we're lacking here is any kind of useful detail.
Is 1,000 words 5% of what they might hear in a day? 50%? Seems important to know.
Does an hour of screen time reduce vocabulary by 5%? 50%? Increase it by 50%? Study doesn't tell us.
[1]https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...
I suspect that doesn't tell the whole story you seem to be getting at, though. My guess is that people who will just hand a toddler a tablet to keep them entertained are probably those who would be at the lower end of that range anyway. The effects of a less linguistically rich environment on a child's language development are cumulative as well. Just saying "oh, 1000 words is 5-15% fewer words per day" seems to downplay the issue too much.
I guess the message here is "Talk to your kids lots, when you have the energy to do so. That way they can spend their downtime however they fancy."
Please don't reproduce.
Remember that received an invitation to participate IQ test when I was in 3rd grade, gave the letter to my garbage parent and then never heard anything back. Class teacher may have noticed that there is a weird kid in the class and wanted to do something. But sorry miss you can't help me. Babies should be public property and let gov handle them when parents do not meet the intelligence criteria.
Just to say that maybe elsagate videos worth more than some human adults.
Maybe actually read what he wrote.
The lead was buried but it was there. While I - somewhat - agree with their notion/premise, it only works in governments with a modicum of socialism implemented.
I had the inverse experience from the original commenter: I was promised a test to earn the equivalent credit in school (and advance) but, after waiting and gentling prodding for over half a year, nothing came to fruition. I gave up. If no one else cared, why should I?
Depending on a mostly apathetic system can be as bad as apathetic parents - from first-hand experience.
I don't presume to have a solution, to be sure, but bad parents and/or bad systems aren't easily overcome.
[1] - https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/bury-the-lede-versu...
https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2019/lead-vs-lede-...
Not an expert, but my advice to you is to stop blaming your parents. The reason is when you blame others and make yourself a victim, you train yourself to believe that things are out of your hands. Going forward you have a choice. Use it. So your parents stunted your growth; what will you do about your future growth now?