Shonkoff, a pediatrician and the director of Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child, calls it the “serve and return” style of communication the psychologists Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff describe a “conversational duet.” The vocal patterns parents everywhere tend to adopt during exchanges with infants and toddlers are marked by a higher-pitched tone, simplified grammar, and engaged, exaggerated enthusiasm. We’re in uncharted territory.Ĭ hild-development experts have different names for the dyadic signaling system between adult and child, which builds the basic architecture of the brain. The new parental-interaction style can interrupt an ancient emotional cueing system, whose hallmark is responsive communication, the basis of most human learning. Yet for all the talk about children’s screen time, surprisingly little attention is paid to screen use by parents themselves, who now suffer from what the technology expert Linda Stone more than 20 years ago called “continuous partial attention.” This condition is harming not just us, as Stone has argued it is harming our children. That I somehow managed to watch every single episode of each show scores of times has never been explained.) Still, no one really disputes the tremendous opportunity costs to young children who are plugged in to a screen: Time spent on devices is time not spent actively exploring the world and relating to other human beings. (My mother-unusually for her time-prohibited Speed Racer and Gilligan’s Island on the grounds of insipidness. And, of course, many well-functioning adults survived a mind-numbing childhood spent watching a lot of cognitive garbage.
#MY MOST USED WORDS APP DANGER TV#
Some of the newer interactive games kids play on phones or tablets may be more benign than watching TV (or YouTube), in that they better mimic children’s natural play behaviors.
And, since 1970, the average age of onset of “regular” screen use has gone from 4 years to just four months. Today’s preschoolers spend more than four hours a day facing a screen.
To argue that parents’ use of screens is an underappreciated problem isn’t to discount the direct risks screens pose to children: Substantial evidence suggests that many types of screen time (especially those involving fast-paced or violent imagery) are damaging to young brains. My own adult children like to joke that they wouldn’t have survived infancy if I’d had a smartphone in my clutches 25 years ago. To be clear, I’m not unsympathetic to parents in this predicament. Parents are constantly present in their children’s lives physically, but they are less emotionally attuned. But the engagement between parent and child is increasingly low-quality, even ersatz. Despite a dramatic increase in the percentage of women in the workforce, mothers today astoundingly spend more time caring for their children than mothers did in the 1960s. Yes, parents now have more face time with their children than did almost any parents in history.
More than screen-obsessed young children, we should be concerned about tuned-out parents. It involves kids’ development, but it’s probably not what you think. Our society may be reaching peak criticism of digital devices.Įven so, emerging research suggests that a key problem remains underappreciated. S martphones have by now been implicated in so many crummy outcomes-car fatalities, sleep disturbances, empathy loss, relationship problems, failure to notice a clown on a unicycle-that it almost seems easier to list the things they don’t mess up than the things they do.
0 kommentar(er)
