We reviewed 100 studies about little kids and screens. Here are 4 ways to help your child use them well.
We reviewed 100 studies about little kids and screens. Here are 4 ways to help your child use them well.
Many parents worry about screen use and their children. Research shows it helps if you watch with your kids and talk about the program.
- Make screen time together time
- Choose age-appropriate content that encourages play
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AD- Don’t let screens get in the way of parent-child interactions
- Don’t have the TV on in the background
Could you maybe throw an ad or two in your summary? Feels weird just seeing all information.
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Got it, so take the NES out of the drawer.
Kids need to learn how to blow into cartridges the right way to make them work.
So, I'm missing hot single women because of uBlock I'm using. 😱 Better turn off adblocker immediately! Wait, no - it was my wife that turned it on. 😅
Anecdotally, I'm seeing a lot of parents with kids as old as 10 in carts at the grocery store, and those kids are sitting there staring at a tablet or a phone.
As young as 2, also.
It's constant and nonstop and they don't look up for anything.
I'm concerned.
Even if they were reading a book, a 10 year old in the cart still sounds a bit silly.
I remember being very active as a kid at the super market running “missions” to get items. One time I dropped a jar of tomato sauce on the floor and I felt so bad about it. Another time I remember college kids making fun of me for pushing the cart (to be fair it probably looked quite ridiculous). Now I look back and laugh…
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Don't be like me, who pretty much spends most of his free time in front of a screen.
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Don't become absolutely addicted to your screens, like me.
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Don't spend most of your time inside, like me.
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Profit from not being someone like me. Screen life gets boring after a while.
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When my much younger twin cousins were born, my Aunt and Uncle decided to restrict them almost 100% from screens for the first 3 years of their lives, to the point where they would ask people to put their phones away when around them.
At the time, I thought that was a bit extreme, but seeing those two grow into the most active, intelligent, and happy kids I've ever met (especially in their generation), I no longer question their parenting methods. There are obviously a ton of other factors and good parenting practices they followed, but seeing the numerous issues "iPad kids" tend to have, I can't help but feel they were really on to something.
Cool moral panic anecdote
The negative impact a lot of screen time has on kids is very well documented. Basically, even educational shows do basically nothing for young kids. It's passive and doesn't help development in any way. Kids benefit a lot more from active exploration, play, and socialization.
"Moral panic" is a phrase reserved for complaints that have no basis in reality.
The best decision we did was skip TV to instead play video games together. We sit down as a family and my son plays Dinkum and Farm Together and Untitled Goose Game, real easy ones.
He asks us questions and wants to read the text and learns the game mechanics and has ideas that are fun to watch develop.
Moral panics gonna panic.
Edit: nothing new under the sun.
In 1941, Mary Preston published “Children’s Reactions to Movie Horrors and Radio Crime” in The Journal of Pediatrics. The American pediatrician had studied hundreds of 6- to 16-year-old children and concluded that more than half were severely addicted to radio and movie crime dramas, having given themselves “over to a habit-forming practice very difficult to overcome, no matter how the aftereffects are dreaded”
Read about this and more at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1745691620919372
I think this genuinely valuable research. Attention spans in kids are nearly non-existent. My own daughter refuses to be in a long car ride without her tablet.
A small help/guide about how to use this great technology to my child’s benefit rather than detriment is fine with me.
Lol, "shrinking attention spans" and worrying about what's happening to the children is the panic. Start here, maybe check out the books mentioned https://time.com/6958809/smartphones-screen-time-danger-pete-etchells/