Screen time linked with developmental delays, study finds::Screen time at age 1 is linked with higher risks of developmental delays in toddlerhood, a new study has found.
It seems like the danger here is correlation vs causation.
It might just be that parents who are more prone to producing children with developmental delays also happen to be more likely to put those children in front of a screen to manage their behavior.
I’m not sure the data supports the conclusion this article is making.
It’s talking about parents giving 1 year olds and 2 year olds 1-4 hours of screen time a day. That amount of screen time for developing humans who sleep for a substantial part of the day is most likely poor stimulus in my opinion. I don’t see how you are jumping to parents prone to producing developmentally delayed children. You call nature. I call nurture. But just to check, which parents are more prone to producing children with developmental delays?
Exactly. Also, to make sure the correlation is not caused by other factors such as income, health, education of the parents there should be a statistical correction to make it a sound RCT.
That said, I would argue more than 1 hour of screen time for a 1 year old is already an extreme amount and thus I would not be surprised to see it has some significant effects on development.
We’re not allowing our daughter to have screentime until she’s two. Other than one video call with her grandparents recently, or to show her images of real animals for education.
It’s been pretty easy really. I’m glad we chose to do it. She’s 17 months old now and doing great! Just watching her play and learn in the world around her is awesome, I can’t imagine her sitting and staring in one direction for 30m straight while some over-energised over-saturated kids show blares at her.
She’s too young to understand the narrative, she’s too young to understand the art, so what’s she getting out of it, other than a bright distraction?
Her mother and I are both super nerdy tech people who love film and gaming, so she’s going to have screens in her life at some point, no doubt, but why rush it? Every day she develops more, and understands more about the world around her, and I want to encourage that first.
I have a niece and nephew who are hooked on screens. And while I do care about my brother and sister in law, they obviously allow that to happen.
We were on a trip together just last week, and I was surprised to see they couldn’t get through a meal without their tablets (both had their own of course). They are both bright kids, and they still played with toys and did kid stuff. But they also did a lot of screen time that just seemed like too much. And whatever they were watching just seemed like nonsense garbage YouTube content.
That last sentence is the killer for me. I don’t want her watching absolute brain rotting unmoderated YouTube junk ever in her life.
I’d rather download a huge library of good shows and set them up so she can watch them locally.
I’m sure I can’t stop her watching absolute crap, especially when peer pressure kicks in one day, but I can hopefully help guide her little brain in the right direction to differentiate between what’s distracting and what’s genuinely interesting.
Same here, we’ve made it to 3 now without any screens and our house looks like a children’s book library, our daughter is bilingual and ahead of her age cohort. Of course that’s again a correlation/causation thing, but being able to connect with her over reading books, answering questions (so.many. questions…) has been wonderful. She’ll be hit with digital everything soon enough, so why rush it indeed. At the moment she’s doing video calls with the grandparents and very occasionally looking at photos or animals on the phone, and that’s it.
I’m not that shocked.
