Why the best holiday gift could be the worst
For lots of parents and grandparents, there’s a clear way to be a hero this holiday season: Nestle an iPad under the tree.
Increasingly, personal digital devices have become musthaves for kids, even the under-5 set. They’re endlessly entertaining, of course, but they’re also incredibly useful for parents. I know a mom who used screens as a distraction for her daughter during potty training. Many parents have experienced tablets’ magical ability to keep children reasonably well behaved at restaurants. And they can be key to ensuring a quiet flight.
Last time I was on an airplane, I pulled out some picture books, and the flight attendant smiled. “Books!” she said wryly. “You don’t see those much anymore.” (To be clear, my children also begged to spend time watching the backof-seat screens on the plane, which they did.)
Problem is, while America embraces screens for ever-younger children, data about the harmfulness of that consumption just keeps piling up.
Earlier this year, researchers reported in the American Medical Association journal JAMA Pediatrics that 1-year-olds who spend more time in front of screens have more trouble with problem-solving and communication by age 4.
That shouldn’t have come as a surprise. In 2020, when researchers analyzed data from 42 studies that evaluated children’s use of screens, they found that “greater quantity of screen use was associated with lower language skills in children.” They also found that screen time replaced time spent on other things, like learning to draw and talk. Already disadvantaged groups appear to be particularly at risk for that sort of learning loss.
The World Health Organization has argued that children under 5 should be limited to a maximum of one hour of screen time a day (and children under 2 should watch no screens at all). But as we all know, such recommendations are not breaking through.
Kids between 2 and 4 average two and a half hours a day in front of screens, as Common Sense Media found in its 2020 media census (based on data gathered before pandemic shutdowns). And nearly half of those kids — between the ages of 2 and 4! — had their own tablet or smartphone.
A few months ago, I was sitting in the waiting room at the pediatrician’s office and saw a mom turn her phone sideways and push it into a stroller. She held it there, because her daughter was lying down and couldn’t sit up.
The problem with research suggesting that screens aren’t good for young kids is that screens dovetail so nicely with modern life. Parents are being pinged constantly by their own devices. They work long hours. The cost of babysitting is astronomical.
There is, of course, resistance to screens, but not necessarily from those you might expect. About a dozen years ago, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said that his own children were not allowed to play with iPads. Lynn Perkins, CEO of the babysitting placement firm UrbanSitter, has noted that many people with important jobs in tech are similarly worried about exposing their kids to screens. “The people who are closest to tech are the most strict about it at home,” she said. “We see that trend with our nannies very clearly.”
Parents are right to worry about whether screen time inhibits children’s ability to focus, learn, and meaningfully synthesize what they’ve learned. Even before the first iPads debuted — turning children’s programming into a handheld affair — researchers had started to question the value of so-called educational content for young kids. After Baby Einstein (and Baby Shakespeare and Baby Mozart) rocketed to popularity in the late 1990s, researchers found that watching more of those sorts of videos actually resulted in slower vocabulary expansion than occurred with children who spent less time in front of screens.
Mass General Hospital psychiatrist Carl Marci, author of the book “Rewired: Protecting Your Brain in the Digital Age,” writes that “when it comes to infant learning, videos are no substitute for face-to-face interaction. Adults who believe otherwise are assuming brain resources that don’t yet exist.”
Making matters worse, a lot has changed since the days of Baby Einstein. Today’s media creators are much more sophisticated — and young kids are not. Marci argues that creators design “compulsion loops” to maximize the amount of time kids spend on devices. And the insidious video autoplay feature that lots of platforms employ will likely offer even more compelling suggestions as artificial intelligence matures. “Along with many parents and caregivers,” Marci notes, “I have discovered that the structure of new media makes it particularly hard to extricate kids from the digital playpen.”
Of course, digital devices — and the content on them — are supported by some of the richest and most powerful corporations in the world. And it’s hard for parents to resist their offerings. After all, getting a kid a device is useful. It’s affordable for many. And it sometimes seems like everyone else is doing it.
As the scholar Jonathan Haidt has suggested, one possible solution here might be small-scale parent alliances. If my neighbors and I all agree that we won’t get our kids personal devices before the age of 8 or 10 (or older), both parents and kids will feel less isolated.
Schools, too, could help parents connect with other no-device parents. Even if only a quarter of second-graders, say, lack tablets, that’s still a bunch of kids who know they’re in the same boat.
It’s worth trying to slow things down here, even just a bit. It’s worth worrying about the huge, uncontrolled experiment we’re conducting on a generation. Early results don’t look promising, and yet the experiment just keeps barreling ahead.