KIDS are growing up with the expectation of auto-playing, streaming videos and having access to our phones when we need them to be quiet.
With the rapid pace at which new digital products and services are being developed, parents report feeling particularly overwhelmed.
They fear missing out on what benefits tech might hold for their families, yet don’t fully trust that electronic devices and apps are designed or marketed with their child’s best interests in mind.
Through a review of the updated science, interviews and focus groups with parents from diverse backgrounds, and our own clinical experience, we are now recommending that parents use media as a teaching tool – a way to connect and create – instead of just to consume.
This new policy statement represents the best medical research and academic scholarship about electronic media and health and development of children from birth through the age of five. Along with the associated family media-use planning website, it focuses on how parents can use electronic media together with their young children to encourage family connection, learning and digital literacy skills, in several ways:
l We emphasise teaching children that media use means more than just entertainment. It can also involve connecting with others: Video- chatting for example is fine at any age, although infants need their parents’ help to understand it. Another great use is for creating and learning together – letting the child take photos and record videos or songs, as well as looking up craft ideas.
We hope parents will feel comfortable seeing digital media as a tool to meet their parenting needs and not the thing-in-itself that controls us or our children through the attention economy or gamification. As far as entertainment, we recommend trusted content producers such as Sesame Workshop and PBS Kids, who design apps with the child’s and parent’s needs in mind.
There is also Common Sense Media, a great site for finding information on digital products and answering any tech-related parenting question you can imagine.
l We recommend having unplugged spaces and times of day so that both parent and child can play, be bored, or talk without distraction or feeling a need to to multi-task.
l We ask parents to test apps and watch videos with their children to determine if they are good fits rather than letting the child make all of these choices. Parents are the best people to decide whether a particular app or video is appropriate. Parents should not feel pressure to introduce their children to technology early in life for the sake of seeking a competitive advantage. Kids will catch up when they are older or in school.
But if parents want to introduce media early, the youngest age we recommend is 18 months. At that age, it’s important to note, parents must play or view along with the child for there to be any educational benefit, such as learning new words. Otherwise that expensive tablet may just be a portable TV or cause-and-effect toy.
We want to raise kids who don’t react to negative emotions by spewing out their feelings online, nor binge on videos or games. We want to raise kids with good sleep habits, healthy bodies, a variety of interests and curiosity about the world, who feel good about their learning and their relationships, both on- and offline. We hope our new guidance can help us all achieve that.
l Radesky is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Michigan University. This article first appeared in The Conversation