Kill Your TV (and Laptop, iphone and ipad)

Kill Your Television (by Vik Nanda)

Children under age 2 should not watch television or videos because it could impair their development, according to a new report by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). The new report also happens to reaffirm what they’ve been saying for the past decade. 

However, this advice is routinely ignored by most parents. The report indicates that 90% of parents with children under 2 let their babies and toddlers watch some form of electronic media, with the average child watching one to two hours of TV or videos per day. Children with single mothers and low-income children watch more than this on average. 

The report did not discuss any direct effects that television or videos might have on the developing brain. However, it did emphasize that watching TV takes children away from other healthier or more educational activities like unstructured playtime or bonding with their parents.

It should be no surprise that children in low income and single parent households are watching more television, as these parents tend to have more stressful and busier lives. Television is an easy way to keep a small child preoccupied while dinner is prepared and chores are done. It is also a convenient way to buy a little extra peace and quiet after a long day at work or while finishing a meal.

However, with the ubiquity of media players, even affluent families may be relying on videos more than in the past. SUV’s come equipped with DVD players to keep the kids amused on long trips (or short errands). Parents sometimes allow their small children to play with ipads in waiting rooms. Small, toddler-friendly portable DVD players are used by parents to sneak in an extra hour of sleep on weekends.

Another factor contributing to the misuse of media with babies and toddlers is ignorance and misinformation. According to the AAP report, while many video programs for infants and toddlers claim to be “educational,” the evidence does not support this claim for children under the age of 2. Also, some parents do not realize how important unstructured play time is for children to learn to think creatively, problem solve, and develop reasoning and motor skills, or that they learn more from interacting with live humans than from screens.

Unstructured play time does not require expensive toys. In fact, young children like to play with almost anything they can get their hands on, especially if they see their parents using it. Between the ages of one and two, my son loved to play with cooking utensils while we prepared dinner, including measuring cups and spoons. He is now four and I am still amazed at how much he can amuse himself with common household items during unstructured playtime. Of course he loves his Buzz Lightyear doll and his DVDs, but what he enjoys more than anything is constructing pretend machines, tools, vehicles, robots and guns from nuts and bolts, rubber bands, wooden chopsticks, ropes, tinker toys, wires and whatever else he can find lying around the house.

While he can keep himself entertained like this for extended periods of time (occasionally for as long as an hour), he enjoys it even more if I get involved. And I have to say that as busy or tired as I may be, it truly is the most peaceful and enjoyable part of my day to participate in his make believe world, as villain, hero or coconspirator. It pulls me away from my own worries and stresses far better than any movie or television show possibly can and brings me back, even if only fleetingly so, to a carefree time in my own life when anything was possible.

Poverty Diminishes Vocabulary

Image by Shanelkalicharan

A common theme in my writing is how much poverty impacts our students and their academic success. On average, middle class and higher income kids simply do better in school and on standardized exams than lower income kids. The reasons for this are complex and have not been fully explored. However, we do know that wealth affects health and cognitive development, social development and language acquisition, creating an achievement gap that exists before kids have even entered school. Two seminal pieces of research bear this out: Unequal at the Starting Gate, by David Burkam and Valerie Lee, and Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children, by Betty Hart and Todd Risely. The latter work was discussed today on NPR, including an interview with coauthor Betty Hart. You can hear the interview or read the transcript at Closing the Achievement Gap with Baby Talk.

Arne Duncan, Bill Gates and many other Ed Deformers claim to be color and class blind, arguing that all kids can succeed in school, if we only provide quality teachers and schools. Many teachers enter the profession with these same assumptions. Likewise, when Betty Hart first started working with low income preschoolers, she believed she could help them transcend their limitations. Together with Todd Risley, she tried to improve the vocabularies of 4-year-olds in a low income preschool. However, after years of effort, they realized that they weren’t making much progress because they were catching the kids too late.

Image by ECohen

Shockingly, by the time kids are four, the effects of familial wealth have already made their mark on a child’s vocabulary. But Hart and Risely wanted to know why and they wanted to know how early these effects started to occur. So they followed 40 families from different income levels over the course of their children’s first three years, recording what the children said.

It took 10 years to transcribe and analyze their tapes. They found that children in welfare homes heard an average of 600 words per hour, compared to 2,100 in homes of professionals. By the time kids are four, this adds up to a total of about 13 million words heard by poor kids and 48 million words for affluent kids. Thus, before they have even entered kindergarten, there is a significant gap in language acquisition that affects school readiness.

Hart and Risely’s work was published in 1995 and led many in child development to rethink how they could work with parents to improve children’s language development. An important follow up to their research was conducted by Alan Mendelsohn, a pediatrician at New York’s Bellevue Hospital. In this study, Mendelsohn, et al, enrolled 675 mother-infant pairs in a randomized controlled experiment that compared two interventions that occurred during pediatric checkups: the Video Interaction Project and Building Blocks. A control group received standard pediatric treatment. For details, please see Study: Doctor Visits Give Opportunity for School Readiness Check-up.

All three groups of mother-child dyads received books and literacy materials from the Reach Out and Read program. Parents in the Building Blocks group also received developmental questionnaires and newsletters suggesting additional reading and play activities they could do at home to encourage literacy development. Those in the Video Interaction Project also met with child development experts at each of 15 wellness visits during their child’s first 3 years. During these visits, mothers were videotaped playing with their children. The child development experts then debriefed the videotapes with the mothers and coached them to help them become more effective in their interactions with their children.

By the age of 6 months, the infants in the video intervention group had significantly higher scores than those in the control group on the StimQ infant test, which measures pre-literacy activities. Those in the Building Blocks program had slightly higher scores than those in the control group. In summary, Mendelsohn’s work indicates that coaching parents can help them become better at communicating with their infants and improve their early language development.

It should be pointed out, though, that Mendelsohn’s program, even if fully implemented by pediatricians across the country, cannot alleviate all the negative effects that poverty has on school success. First, low income families are less likely to receive prenatal and postnatal care or regular checkups, thus precluding many families from receiving coaching during pediatric visits. Also, poverty negatively affects children in a variety of ways that cannot be mitigated solely through better parental communication. For example, poor children are much more likely to suffer malnutrition, low birth weights, lead or other environmental poisonings, and anemia, each of which can impair cognitive development and lead to learning disabilities. Financial insecurity creates chronic stress that can impair the immune system, memory and learning, and increase absenteeism. Low income families are much less likely to be able to provide ongoing extracurricular enrichment activities like travel, summer camp, art classes and athletics. Therefore, to really close the achievement gap requires a social movement that succeeds in closing the wealth gap.