The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommends avoiding screens for children younger than 18 to 24 months, except when video chatting with family. What age is appropriate to introduce screens? It’s that back-and-forth “conversation,” sharing facial expressions and reacting to the other person - in real life, rather than “passive” listening or one-way interaction with a screen - that improves language and communication skills in young children. Research shows that talking with children in a reciprocal dialogue is extremely important for language development and social interaction. Tell us more about how screen time affects language and communication. There is also some evidence that children who watch a lot of television during the early elementary school years perform less well on reading tests and may show deficits in attention. Language development expands rapidly between 1½ to 3 years of age, and studies have shown that children learn language best when engaging and interacting with adults who are talking and playing with them. It’s not that they won’t be captivated by what’s on the screen, but they’re not learning from it.
Studies have shown that children under 2 learn less from a video than when learning from another person, and it appears that although children will watch the TV screen by 6 months, understanding the content does not generally occur until after age 2. How does screen time impact a child’s ability to learn? This will not just affect their ability to learn new things, but also how they interact with others and how language develops. They will not learn about the world around them if all they’re doing is looking at a smartphone. When I see children walking with a parent or being pushed in a stroller, they are often playing on a smartphone or a tablet and not paying attention to anything else around them. Excessive screen time may inhibit a child’s ability to observe and experience the typical everyday activities they need to engage with in order to learn about the world, leading to a kind of “tunnel vision,” which can be detrimental to overall development.
Young children learn by exploring their environment and watching the adults in their lives and then imitating them. But how do screens affect early childhood development?įor young children, especially those under the age of 3, development is happening rapidly. We know that kids have easy access to screens, now more than ever. Cross, also an assistant professor of clinical pediatrics at Weill Cornell Medicine, about the impact of screen time on kids’ developing brains and what parents and caregivers can do.
You would have really strong arm muscles, but at the expense of overall fitness.” Interacting almost exclusively with screens would be like working out only your arm muscles and nothing else. “If young children spend most of their time engaging with an iPad, smartphone, or the television, all of which are highly entertaining, it can be hard to get them engaged in non-electronic activities, such as playing with toys to foster imagination and creativity, exploring outdoors, and playing with other children to develop appropriate social skills. Cross, attending pediatrician and a developmental and behavioral pediatrics expert at NewYork-Presbyterian Komansky Children’s Hospital. “We’re not sure what this data means yet, but what we can hypothesize is that screens could inhibit certain aspects of a child’s development by narrowing their focus of interest and limiting their other means of exploration and learning,” says Dr. What is all this screen time doing to kids’ brains?Įarly data from a landmark National Institutes of Health (NIH) study that began in 2018 indicates that children who spent more than two hours a day on screen-time activities scored lower on language and thinking tests, and some children with more than seven hours a day of screen time experienced thinning of the brain’s cortex, the area of the brain related to critical thinking and reasoning. Consider this: Nearly half of all children 8 and under have their own tablet device and spend an average of about 2.25 hours a day on digital screens, according to Common Sense Media.