Dhwani was always an active 3 year old kid, running around the house, playing with her toys and grandparents, making everyone laugh and adore her with her innocent antics.
The only time she was troublesome was at the time she ate food. She would always run away from sitting down idle and eat. Her parents were worried and began thinking of a solution.
So they began using YouTube. A cartoon or an animal rhyme became a routine during feeding her to grab her attention. She began settling down, glued to the screen, eating quietly. However, something changed.
Unlike her previous active self, she began spending most of her time in front of the TV, lazing out, watching cartoons even if she was not eating. This got everyone worrying more.
Did her parents introduce her to something addictive?
With the arrival of technology and screens being omnipresent, it is difficult to ‘screen’ kids from unproductive screen time. To complicate matters, some screen time can actually be educational for children as well as support their social development. So how do parents manage their child’s screen time? Today, we will explore this tricky question.
Research has shown that children can learn from screen media experiences, with adult engagement, support and guidance, as early as 6 months of age. Parents and caregivers often think very young children are not aware of background media because they look up briefly and then look away but the fact is, infants are always aware of background media because the sound effects, lights, and images lead to an “automatic orienting response” (meaning that children automatically look up to see what’s happening). Even if they look at the screen briefly, it is significantly interrupting their play. Woah!
So is screen time always bad? To understand it better, let’s break it into the pros and cons
Pros of screen time
With moderation, there are some benefits of screen time to children:
- Educational value for example learn alphabets through visual rhymes, learn reverse counting through informative visualization. Few Smartboard sorting games where children drag circles and squares into two “piles” on the Smartboard could be an engaging use of technology that has an intentional, age-appropriate learning goal.
- Playing video games can improve motor skills and coordination
- Storytelling, memory building and learning linguistic/communication skills via animal videos, visual representation of classic fables
Cons of screen time
- Redundancy. According to research, there is no compulsion to integrate technology into the infant/toddler classroom as a tool to maximize learning as young children learn effectively and efficiently from their environments-challenging experiences, toys, objects and people. Playing a video of a book being read aloud to children is not a particularly impactful use of technology as children learn far more when the reader is “live” and can ask them questions, introduce vocabulary, and engage them in the story.
- Technoference. It is the parents getting distracted away from children due to technology. Background television and technoference have shown to result in poorer play and language learning for children through parents.
- Inadequate sleep: Low-quality content (with no learning/educational goals) and screen time in the hour before bedtime have been shown to interfere with sleep.
- Lethargic, setback lifestyle: Outdoor time is necessary to support the healthy development of the entire physical system of the body. Long hours in front of screens promote obesity, reduce creativity and lead to addictive behaviour as seen in Dhwani above.
- Poor quality media content, and high exposure rates (high levels of screen time) correlate with negative impacts on children’s attentional skills. However, the link to ADHD is not understood at this time.
Having weighed both sides of the story broadly, let’s come to the million dollar question-What can parents do to substitute screen time or how to allow children to use screens justifiably?
In our next blog, Screening the Screen Time for Toddlers & Preschoolers, we will ponder upon this question to give you some quick takeaways. Keep reading!