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The American Academy of Paediatrics (AAP) has revised its guidelines on screen/television exposure for infants to allow for the indoctrination of 18-month-old children, from its earlier recommendation of 24 months and older:
The American Academy of Paediatrics (AAP) has announced new screen time guidelines for children aged up to two. It had recommended that children have no screen time before the age of two. But it now says children aged over 18 months can use video chat with family, and 18-month to five-year-olds can watch "high quality" programmes with parents. However, it also says physical activity and face-to-face interaction should be prioritised.
[...] Dr Steiner-Adair also called for more research into the benefits of educational apps, describing them as an "unregulated" industry. "I haven't seen who is developing the measures of learning for young children - what is actually going on?" she said. "What we do know is the toddler brain lights up for learning language the most when they are being spoken to in real life, face-to-face, by a caring adult. I would like to see more of how they assess the actual learning that goes on between 18-24 months [via screens] and how they compare it to learning from being read to by an adult from a real book."
Create a Family Media Plan here.
Media and Young Minds (open, DOI: 10.1542/peds.2016-2591) (DX)
(Score: 5, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday October 27 2016, @09:34PM
I really wish this sort of recommendation would stop being phrased in terms of amount of screen TIME. If you even read the report, you discover that there are a lot of other factors at play. Put bad parenting and inappropriate content together, and they reinforce bad results. Put good parenting and good educational content together, and they reinforce good results.
And when it comes to content, there's a LOT of junk out there for young kids to consume. I choose those words deliberately, because it's just like junk food -- it goes "down easy," but has little substance. Heck, even Elmo (part of the Sesame Street programming that the AAP endorses) is a little crazy. My son was nearly 2 years old before he EVER saw kids programming. We'd have the TV on around him sometimes, but it was always adult stuff -- not inappropriate for kids to see kind of stuff, but just stuff adults might like to watch. And you know what? He couldn't care less about the TV. It was of no interest. There were only two times he'd perk up and look at the screen -- credits and commercials. The credits probably seemed weird because the screen often went black with words on it and with music (he liked listening to music). And he rarely saw commercials because we had already "cut the cord" and gotten rid of cable. But when we went to visit family and they had broadcast TV on, his little head would just swivel around quickly whenever a commercial came on.
Why? Because commercials are "junk" TV. They are explicitly designed to draw your attention in by doing weird stuff and changing fast. Perfect stuff for people with no attention span.
I still remember the first time we came home to find that a babysitter (in a moment of desperation) had let him watch Elmo. Suddenly, this kid who would rarely even notice if the TV were on was glued to the screen, and he wanted to watch Elmo all the time. When I first watched it (having never seen actual Sesame Street Elmo segments before), I was a bit horrified. It seemed designed for people with no attention span, doing everything possible to keep a young kid's attention. It's no wonder my kid suddenly was drawn to it.
But then I encountered other "TV for young kids" and I realized how good stuff like Elmo was compared to a lot of the other crap out there. At least Elmo was vaguely educational (and the rest of Sesame Street even more so).
Anyhow, to get to my point -- most parents LIKE stuff like that "junk TV" (and now similar apps and things on other devices). Why? Because it becomes effectively a substitute babysitter. If you watch other stuff with kids, you might actually have to deal with the fact that they get bored and come bother you. But if you use "junk TV," with some caffeinated crazy shenanigans designed just to "push the buttons" of toddlers, you might get a free 30 or 60 minutes or whatever to do something else.
So, it's not really about the time, from my perspective -- it's a lot more about the type of content you're choosing. But even more important is what ELSE you're doing with your kid. Studies seem to show that interactivity with real people is critical for things like language development, which makes a lot of sense if you've ever spent time with a little kid learning language. They need to be able to try out utterances and be corrected. They need parents to talk with them and AT them, to show examples of spontaneous language use. They don't learn through linguistic rules -- they learn through years of trial and error... so they need to be able to do a LOT of trials.
If your kid isn't watching TV, what is he/she doing instead? That's the real question. If the answer is sitting on the floor being somewhat bored while the parent is on Facebook on his/her phone (and thus refuses to interact other than saying "huh... umm..." etc. once in a while), then I'm not sure that's actually better than having the kid watch Sesame Street.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday October 28 2016, @10:56AM
"most parents LIKE stuff like that "junk TV""
As time passes, you see more and more parents who like that stuff, not because it's a substitute baby sitter, but because THE PARENTS LIKE IT!
My own relationship with cartoons, over time: At ages 3 through about 8, I lived for Saturday morning and Hanna Barbera. That was better than Friday night and The Outer Limits, primarily because I didn't understand a lot of TOL. From about 8 to maybe 13, those cartoons were a distraction when I couldn't be outside doing something more important. The early teens, cartoons became a real distraction. Given the opportunity, I would just turn the television OFF so that I could concentrate on something, anything, that was more important. Older teens? Forget it, I had a car. Television was for kids and old people. Younger adulthood I spent in the Navy, and had no time for television at all.
Finally, as a parent, I rediscovered television. Yeah, I took advantage of that idiot babysitter from time to time. Actually, I was kinda hoping to rediscover my old relationship with television - spend some hours in front of the boob tube, just enjoying whatever. But, the character of the television had changed a lot. The mindlessness of Hanna Barbera permeated all of television, it seemed. It was all pointless. Nothing to share with the kids - better to drag their arses outside and lose them in the garden patch. Or to find them squishing through the mud at the creek. Anything was better than television.
The craziest thing about television? I find adults who live for that mindless drivel, just as I did as a child. Grown up men and women who apparently have no life, and spend hours of their day in front of that mindless nonsense.
Is it any wonder that THEIR KIDS take their cues for laughter from a canned laugh track?