The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier and Happier (24 page)

For the moment, let’s put aside the debate about the value of motherese and consider which child will be more voluble at circle time when the kindergarten teacher asks a volunteer to describe the shape of the clouds that day. Is it the child whose parents don’t expect him to use up any airtime? Or is it the child whose parents view him as an active participant in family life before his infant eyes can focus? And here’s another thought: Studies show that most parents in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and the rest of the EU are not that concerned about how much screen time their kids are getting. Fewer than one in three American children say their parents limit TV watching or playing video games. The parents of British children—who spend an average of six hours a day in front of such screens—“felt that they had things about right,” summarized Lydia Plowman, the lead British researcher of a long-term study of media use.
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In families where the culture is to leave kids to their own devices (literally), what role do hours of screen time play in a child’s psychological development, school progress, or even happiness?

SCREENS AND SOCIAL CLASS

Before I even get to the screens, consider how skill gaps are widened by social class. In
The Social Animal
, David Brooks describes some of the ways that child-rearing styles among lower-class families differ from the engaged, debate- and tutorial-driven parenting of the
professional classes. In lower-class homes “there tends to be a much starker boundary between the adult world and the children’s world,” Brooks writes. “Parents tend to think that the cares of adulthood will come soon enough and that children should be left alone to organize their own playtime.” This hands-off approach means children spend less time interacting with adults and more time in front of the screen. For school-aged children, the average is over eight hours a day, more time than most adults spend at a full-time job.
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The class divide begins early. Babies born to poor families “watch” up to three and a half hours of television a day before the age of two, which results in that much less attention from adults and older children. Some researchers have found that this much television viewing is associated with a higher rate of language delay in toddlers.
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As one young mother, an immigrant living alone with her two-year-old, told me, “TV is a big part of Brian’s life because it keeps him busy while I do things around the house.” When I asked if she talks to her toddler while she works, describing what she’s doing, and if he then responds, pointing things out and naming them for her, her brows knitted with worry. “He’s not really talking yet,” she said. His world was baby-oriented television programming and videos. Her world was the adult sphere of household chores and responsibilities. As caring as she was, it had never dawned on this young mother to talk to her child as she would if an adult were in the room.

Take, as another example, the experience of nine-year-old Katie Brindle. In 1993, University of Pennsylvania sociologist Annette Lareau observed Katie, a white girl living in a rundown Philadelphia neighborhood, while the fourth-grader attempted to build a dollhouse in the kitchen out of old boxes and tape. While she was playing, her mother watched television. When Katie ran into trouble, she carried the toppling structure into the living room, plopped down the project at her mother’s feet, and asked her for help. “Nah,” said her mother. Katie was “silent but disappointed,” noted Lareau, but that was it. Their worlds didn’t intersect.

Katie’s was only one of twelve family observations in a larger, long-term study that Lareau was conducting of American families, but her mother’s response was an epiphany for the researcher, crystallizing what she had observed in many other working-class living rooms. Lower-class families are less likely to collaborate with their children to solve problems or to engage them in discussion. In contrast, the upper- and middle-class parents “see their children as a project,” says Lareau.
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They burnish their children’s language and reasoning skills with a barrage of sophisticated chatter and edifying activities: preschool kindergyms, drama groups, choirs, sports and robotics teams. (
Mea culpa
. I ferried my kids to a bevy of extracurricular pursuits that included years of children’s choir, youth orchestra, violin lessons and break dancing classes, as well as music, art, rock-climbing, or wilderness camps during the summers.) This approach costs not only money but time.

Perhaps that’s why most of the working-class families Lareau studied were more hands-off. Their preschoolers may spend more time in front of a screen because they have fewer safe places to play outside or, if there are parks nearby, fewer adults to take them there.
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Still, Lareau observed that these parents often said no to involvement with their children “casually and without guilt, because playtime was deemed inconsequential, a child’s sphere and not an adult’s.”
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Such a division between the parents’ and child’s worlds may result in more relaxed and vibrant kids, Brooks notes; children from lower-class areas have more contact with their extended families, more playtime with neighborhood kids, and they complain less about being bored.
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“Whining, which was pervasive in middle-class homes, was rare in working-class and poor ones,” Lareau observes. But this hands-off style also means that adults talk to kids less, children are alone in front of the screen more, and there’s a lot less interaction and supervision.
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This is not just a North American phenomenon. “Remarkably, in most countries, parents of a low socio-economic status had
almost no rules regarding watching TV,” write the researchers leading the Toybox Study, a long-running survey of the TV-watching habits of children in six EU countries. “Children can watch all day long or whenever they want.”
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Whether or not parents restrict their kids’ screen time is not a moral issue. Indeed, overly conscientious parents (usually mothers) who control how their children spend their out-of-school hours are often lampooned as dragons, helicopters, or worse. Still, when it comes to how much face-to-face interaction a young child gets, the law of unintended consequences may apply. Differences in parenting style are a fairly good predictor of which child will have a bigger vocabulary, become a fluid reader, and years later ace college admission tests.
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Knowing that this triage begins early, a growing number of professionals who work with children are starting to rage against the machine.

TECHNOLOGY IMMERSION

Without early immersion in the latest gadgetry, some parents and teachers warn that kids will find themselves behind the eightball in an i-economy. But how hard is it, really, to master a touch screen? One mother of a two-year-old described the first time her toddler held her father’s iPhone as akin to a religious conversion. “She pressed the button and it lit up. I just remember her eyes. It was like ‘Whoa!’ ” Natasha Sykes told a reporter. At first the child’s parents were charmed by their tot’s instant love affair with new technology. But then she got serious about the phone, Sykes said. “It was like she’d always want the phone.” She’d beg for it and cry for it. The family had blocks, balls, Lego, little toy cars, and books, but “if she knew she had the option of the phone or toys, it will be the phone.”
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And who can blame her? Why should adults get to have all the fun?

Yet if this interface is easy enough for infants—YouTube features dozens of film clips of drooling diaper-clad iPhone users—then commercial apps for babies can’t be far behind. Indeed, downloads for small fry are a lucrative market, and new parents an eager
demographic. Sixty percent of iTunes’ bestselling apps are targeted to toddlers and preschoolers, nearly double the number that target adults. One of them, Pull-Ups iGo Potty, sponsored by Kimberly-Clark, has an insidiously memorable soundtrack: “I know how to use the potty, ’cause I know my stuff. I know how to use the potty, ’cause I’m big enough! No more diapers, no more wet pants, no more icky poo!” The app reminds the toddler to use the potty and then, when she does, rewards her with a tinny “Good job!” and a virtual gold star, followed by virtual applause (the adult must key in the information, of course). Featuring cartoon objects that float among airborne wads of toilet paper, the app also helpfully reminds users not to throw ice cream cones or hamburgers down the toilet. Without any evidence that they work, parents download these apps onto their mobile devices and then pass them to their kids, hoping to offload one of the most detested jobs of early parenthood. There is now even an iPotty with a three-position dock for an iPad, so toddlers can watch videos and play video games while they master sphincter control (splash guard and iPad sold separately). For those parents who might want to outsource other aspects of early parenting, there are apps that purportedly teach babies to say their first words. One promotional blurb asks: “What parent hasn’t held up items and said their name aloud? You hold up a sock and say ‘so-ock.’ Now Baby Flashcards has taken that game and made it virtual!”

It’s too early to know whether an app can help toddlers control their bladders or kick-start their speech. Right now there’s no evidence that they do, nor is there a contingent of researchers seriously investigating the question. That’s a telling sign of avoidance, or maybe wishful thinking. Sixty-one percent of Americans now own smartphones, according to the Pew Center on the Internet and American Life, as do the majority of adults in Canada and the U.K. Over a third also own tablet computers. If the parents among them have handed over their mobile devices to their preschoolers, it’s not only because toddlers are enthralled by these devices but
because they keep them occupied.
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At least a third of parents also say they believe that using these devices is good for their child’s brain and development.
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“Among the chart-topping products for the iPhone and iPad in the education category of iTunes, apps for toddlers and preschoolers experienced the greatest growth in the last two years,” a think tank on children’s learning and literacy reported in 2012, adding this chilling proviso: “No voluntary or regulatory standards currently exist around marketing products as educational.”
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In other words, let the buyer beware.

The truth is that electronic media—not just television, but the apps, videos, YouTube clips, games, and “social” networks sites—aimed at young children can’t be evaluated because there’s no information yet on their impact. There are some fairly strong hints, though. We know from the latest studies in developmental psychology, neuroscience, and social robotics that much of early learning is driven by the motivation to connect face-to-face. The American developmental psychologists Andrew Meltzoff and his wife, Patricia Kuhl, and their colleagues summarized the lay of the land this way in
Science
: “Children do not compute statistics indiscriminately. Social cues highlight what and when to learn. Even young infants are predisposed to attend to people and are motivated to copy the actions they see others do. They more readily learn and reenact an event when it is produced by a person than by an inanimate device.”
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Translation? For a young child, learning is not a passive act, stripped of human contact. Screens just don’t do the trick.

In 2001, and again in 2011, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued strongly worded advisories discouraging all television—or any screen time at all—for children under two, and suggested that electronic media be tightly limited for preschoolers. The 2011 report provided ample evidence that TV and videos have little educational value, and can even be detrimental to early learning. Despite these warnings and the media coverage they received, only 6 percent of American parents are aware of the guidelines. Forty percent of
American babies three months of age are already watching some form of electronic media; by age two, 90 percent of them are. According to Dimitri Christakis, a researcher and pediatrician, “many children under two, who are only awake for about 10–12 hours a day, are spending as much as 30–40 percent of their waking hours watching TV.” By the age of three, a third of American children have a television in their bedrooms. Preschoolers now spend over four hours a day in front of a screen, more time than they spend on any activity except sleeping. For many of them, this is time spent alone.
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Studies of the impact of screen time on child development are sobering. Two-and-a-half-year-olds who watch more than two hours of TV a day are more likely than other kids to have behavioral and social problems when the researchers catch up with them at the age of five, just when they’re entering kindergarten.
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Another study looked at the hours of television watched each week by more than a thousand randomly selected two- and four-year-olds and then followed up on how those kids were doing at the age of ten. The University of Montreal psychology professor who led this study, Linda Pagani, told me in a phone interview that she collected all kinds of data about this group of 1,314 Canadian children. “The kids had their blood drawn; they were tested for IQ, weighed, poked, and prodded. There were lots of parent interviews too.” Her study included extensive home observations of the families, and controlled for almost anything else that might be skewing their results—the mother’s education, the family’s makeup and how well family members got along, divorce or remarriage, the child’s sex, IQ, temperament, sleep patterns, and diet—all were factored out of the mix so the researchers could bear down on the effects of TV viewing.
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The results were startling. “Every additional hour of TV exposure among toddlers corresponded to a future decrease in classroom engagement, less success at math, increased victimization by classmates, a more sedentary lifestyle, higher consumption of junk food, and ultimately a higher body mass index,” said Pagani.
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Just
as the more one drinks, the drunker one gets, there was a dose–response effect. Each hour of TV watched at twenty-nine months of age increased the odds that the child would become more detached and unengaged as a fourth-grade student. Not just detached and unengaged, mind you, but also less successful at math, fatter, and more likely to be bullied at school. “What we see is that a child with an entrenched habit—well, that continues,” Pagani went on. “Kids who watch excessively at two watch excessively at age ten. And they don’t develop the skills needed for a healthy social life.”