Parents today are inundated with alarmist headlines alerting them to the myriad supposed dangers of modern life; everything from plastic baby bottles to radiation from cell phones to the preservatives in our food are purported to be cause for concern. In this fearful social climate, it's often difficult to determine what truly poses a risk and which issues have been blown wildly out of proportion for the sake of generating revenue and controversy. As such, many parents remain unsure of the potential impact of one of today's most profound changes: The explosive proliferation of media and resultant increase in “screen time” for young children.
Fortunately, research is beginning to emerge which sheds some light on this issue. While some amount of screen time has been a part of childhood since the middle of the 20th century, and has been found to be relatively harmless in moderation, experts are concerned about potentially harmful alterations in the way young people are consuming media. Chiefly, the age at which media consumption typically begins today and the type of media consumed are worrying many experts who specialize in early childhood development.
In the past, children generally began to actively watch television around the age of five or six. It's true that programming for preschool-aged children did also exist, but the selection was limited, and the type of content provided tended to be genteel and paced slowly (e.g. Mr. Roger's Neighborhood).
Today, on the other hand, the average five year old is already consuming at least four hours of media per day (delivered via a range of devices), and media consumption among toddlers is rising rapidly. And, while there is an unprecedented selection of appropriately child-friendly content to choose from, almost all of it is extremely fast-paced in comparison to the kind of media offered even twenty years ago.
Likewise, infants are watching a great deal of television for the first time in history; though infant programming was virtually unheard of just ten years ago, today it is commonplace. In fact, fully 90 percent of children watch TV on a regular basis prior to reaching their second birthday, regardless of the fact that the American Academy of Pediatrics has advised strongly against this practice.
Why The Pace of Content Matters
Human brains, particularly the brains of very young children, are remarkably adaptable. Over millions of years, they have evolved to effectively process anything that happens in “real time”, no matter how rapid or abstruse.
While this worked heavily to our advantage when we were dealing with a hostile natural environment, today this ability can prove problematic when it comes to the way children process “screen time”. Despite the fact that we may consciously be aware that media is fictitious (though very young children usually lack even this barrier of discernment), our brains still treat its consumption as a real-time, real-world event. As such, the artificially rapid pace of today's content becomes what young children expect from their external environment in general; they are, in essence, overstimulated to such a point that overstimulation becomes their idea of normal reality.
This is an issue because off-screen experiences become mundane in comparison; a brain conditioned to expect very high levels of input will automatically tune out experiences which seem too slow, too lacking in stimulation. Naturally, this leads to attentional difficulties later in life.
This effect can actually be observed across species: One notable study on the subject placed mice in a television-like environment (featuring typically fast-paced content) for 6 hours a day over the span of 42 days in total. Just ten days into the study, the researchers discovered that the overstimulated mice were already suffering from hyperactivity, along with memory and attention problems.
The Role of Age
While adults can be negatively impacted by excessive media consumption, the brains of very young children are uniquely susceptible owing to the rapid development they are undergoing. Indeed, the AAP based its recommendation on the fact that just an hour or two of television per day, if consumed prior to the age of three, has been proven to increase a child's risk of developing ADHD. (After the age of three, any more than one to two hours of screen time per day has been shown to similarly increase this risk.) This effect is so profound that within roughly the same time period (between 2003 to 2011) that infants and toddlers began to consume far more media than they had previously, ADHD rates have risen by a staggering 42 percent (as revealed by the Centers for Disease Control’s National Survey of Children’s Health).
While many parents misguidedly believe that educational entertainment is facilitating the growth of their infants' minds, in reality, infants and toddlers learn best through interacting with adults—the way they have learned for countless generations. Indeed, interaction with adults has been proven to have the exact opposite effect to screen time: The more a child is read to, sung to, or taken on outings, the more that child's risk of developing ADHD later in life declines. Additionally, this kind of interaction has been shown to be an essential pathway to developing empathy and social skills.
Protecting Your Child
While it is difficult to limit media exposure in an era when passive entertainment and the devices responsible for delivering it have become ubiquitous, there are steps parents can take to ensure that the risks to their children are minimized:
1. Follow the AAP's recommendations and do not expose children under two years of age to televisions, cell phones, tablets, etc. Likewise, ensure that they receive at least one hour of focused interaction each day; research has shown that each hour of such interaction reduces a child's chances of developing attentional problems by 30%.
2. Do not use screen time as a reward or punishment. Not only does this make it harder to plan and moderate screen time, it assigns additional importance to it, making it more desirable in the eyes of children.
3. Turn off the television at meal times. Not only will doing so limit screen time, it encourages conversation, eye contact, and direct interaction with a group of people—ideal for developing a young child's social skills.
4. Try to moderate your own media consumption. Children learn primarily through emulating their parents, so the more your infant or toddler sees you consuming media, the more he or she will want to do so as well. Likewise, even media playing in the background has been shown to distract infants and toddlers, limiting the amount that they play independently. (Having a bit of quiet time in which to play alone is key to the development of problem-solving skills, so it's important to make time for this each day as well). Studies suggest that children who are frequently distracted by media in their environment may have impaired language skills and experience developmental delays.
5. Make your child's bedroom a media-free zone. Not only will removing all television sets, tablets, and cell phones from your child's bedroom make it easier to monitor his or her screen time, it will improve sleep quality. The “blue light” emitted by backlit screens has been shown to profoundly disrupt the body's internal clock (the “circadian rhythm”), making it harder for children and adults alike to fall asleep and sleep soundly through the night.
6. Allow a reasonable amount of screen time when children are older than three years of age. Children who feel deprived tend to rebel, so banning screen time altogether may do more harm than good for school-aged children. Instead, simply take things in moderation—an hour or two of TV after school is a harmless diversion, and it can even serve as an enriching activity if the media consumed is educational.
