Did you guys see the reports that came out last month about a study showing an association between little kids' use of mobile devices and language delays? It popped up in my Twitter feed again tonight and I have some quick thoughts about it.
Thought #1A: I have questions about their data collection. Specifically, what kinds of neighborhood effects might they be measuring? Kids in higher-crime neighborhoods spend more time on screens. Kids in higher-crime neighborhoods may face risks for developmental delay that are caused by factors like, say, toxins in their water supply. Blaming parents for problems caused by infrastructure would be a dismal idea. (Not that this would stop us from blaming parents for problems caused by infrastructure; I'm just putting it out there.)
Thought #1B: I have more questions about their data collection. The lead author has published a bunch of work on kids and screen time, and at least some of the time they corroborated parents' reports on kids' screen usage. Which is good, because that seems like an area in which sneaky third variables could cause trouble as well. Are moms with more education more likely to downplay screen time, underreporting to reflect what they think should be happening instead of what's actually happening? That could introduce a bogus association or strengthen a weak association, since maternal education buffers against language delay.
Thought #2A: I have questions about whether kids' inclinations might drive the association. Some kids are more motivated than others to learn to talk, and it's often a self-reinforcing preference. When you can only say "ba" and nobody knows whether that means "ball" or "sheep" or "Please play Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata," verbal exchanges are less motivating than they are for kids who have figured out how to express their preferences more clearly. Kids predisposed to autism may find screen time less stressful than human interaction. In neither case does the screen usage cause the language impairment.
Thought #2B: I have questions about whether parents' habits might drive the association. I'm curious about how often kids who spend a lot of time on screens have parents who spend a lot of time on screens themselves. How much of the variability in kids' language outcomes might be related to parental absorption in something else?
Thought #3: Even if it turns out to be true that kids' screen usage causes language to unfold more slowly in toddlers, it's unclear how much we can extrapolate from that. We really don't know what will happen at school age to kids who are a little behind as preschoolers. I'm not comfortable with the suggestion toward the end of the article that screen use might be setting kids up for long-term literacy problems. That's what we call an unwarranted prognostication, friends. Different cultures do things differently with regard to child-directed language, and most kids figure it out anyway. I suspect that the same is true in cultures where heavy use of mobile devices is the norm.
I'll be interested in seeing how it shakes out in future studies. It seems beyond question to me that mobile device use is shaping patterns of interaction -- between adults and children as well as among adults. One day a toddler whose older sibling was being seen in our clinic came marching into my office. "Well, hello," I said, "are you making a break for it? Have you come to help me write this paper? Did it get too boring in the waiting room?" I paused here, expecting the mom to chime right in with a response like, "Come on out of her office, sweetie!" or "What are you doing in there?" When she didn't say anything at all after a long pause, I looked up from the child's face to see that the mom was on her phone. It felt a little like I had lobbed a tennis ball to someone who had laid down her racket to pull up weeds by the back fence. But I know that I am old-fashioned about phone use, and I do believe that language development is a resilient process. I'll be curious to see what the next study reports.
Recent Comments