Any study that doesn’t directly address this is pointless to me.
My daughter has a fair bit of screen time. Very little of it is entirely passive.
The closest she gets to passive is watching Frozen and Frozen II, her latest favorites. She’s constantly explaining the movie to us, singing, dancing, and otherwise more using it as a launching pad for activities than just passively consuming it.
When she watches other things it usually involves myself or my wife discussing the show with her as it’s going. Asking questions, making observations, etc. She’s practicing and developing understanding and communication skills.
When she’s playing on a tablet, it’s usually stuff like Duo ABC where she’s learning and then demonstrating understanding of letters and words or games where she’s playing with the sort of equivalent of a virtual interactive dollhouse and is exercising her imagination making up stories and social interactions and then relaying the stories to us.
We don’t really pay attention to how _much_ screen time she gets as much as what she’s getting out of it. I definitely think she’s had more than her share of “4+ hours” days. But any study that doesn’t differentiate what we’re doing from a kid being left unattended and ignored with some YouTube recommendations all day seems to be… incomplete if I’m being polite.
> At some point, this seems to be less about screen time and more about lack of engagement and active involvement with your kids.
When we were told, as many parents are, “no screen time / limited screen time for kids” I didn’t accept it at face value but instead went digging for what the justification for this advice was.
From what I found you hit the nail on the head. The damage comes from the lack of interaction. Small children are absolute sponges and need to be around and observing and interacting with older children or adults to have the opportunity to sponge up how to be a human and then practice those skills. Plopping them in front of a TV doesn’t accomplish that. Especially when they’re quite young they’re not even able to comprehend the TV as much more than colors and sounds and get nothing.
You seem to be ignoring the evidence presented in pretty much all studies because you want to use screen time for your kid. If the study doesn't specify home conditions I would be wary of doing something potentially really dangerous to my child just so I can say "well they didn't consider this".
we didn't allow anything until the kids got sick and needed nebulizer. Its impossible to keep a 2.5 yr old straight for 15mins with a mask in the face , breathing.
In those tough times:
1) Baby Einsten videos. Young ones love them!
2) the equivalent of Mr. Rogers, but in a foreign language that we speak at home. We mostly allow 10min-45min of screen time, but carefully orchestated around learning. No english TV is allowed unless its directly related to complex learning (as in, physics etc).
Since during sickness the "cat was out of the bag" with respect to what the TV does , then we allowed a bit of YT.
I prefer immersion, for example:At 4yrs old we brought in khan academy (Kids), scratch, or math maze 2 (put together by another HNer, yay!) https://gogamewise.com/games/math-maze-2/
The latter allowed our 5 yr old to do heavy multiplication and fractions.
Our 7yr old is already putting together complex multi-sprite projects on scratch. Our go-to has been Chesskid and Khan AcademyKids, but they will be graduating from Khan Kids soon, so we will see.
We don't allow youtube except for a few obscure shows with no violence, plus 3 popular ones: Blippi, PawPatrol, Octonauts. We only allow watching in foreign languages.
We tried cosmos and kurtgesagt but the shows go too deep into existential questions and caused anxiety in children. That was a big mistake.
You probably know but there is an animated series based on Mr. Rogers, available in streaming dubbed and translated into many languages, called Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood.
this WAS super useful! thank you so much. I would love to follow a running list of your recommendations for different age groups (if u maintain one).
One question - when u say "allow watching in foreign languages".do u mean watch in ur native non-english language...or any language where the kid cannot understand spoken and just sees the visuals ?
my wife and I speak 3 languages. So we put shows from YT dubbed in the 2 non english languages. We also have a hard rule at home to only speak to our kids in those languages. We don't respond to words in english.
Its worked well so far, particularly with COVID travel, but it gets progressively harder.
If we spoke only 1, i'd seriously consider putting shows only in a foreign language of your choice. we haven't done that since they are working on native fluency on the 3 that we speak.
Didn't mention, but start as early as possible. once kids are older, they will resist any sudden attempt at non-english.
Also, don't worry about "speech development" (i.e late talking). Your kids may be slightly behind peers in speech, but they will catch up by age 2-3. Kids are like sponges, they learn everything quickly.
My daughter has a fair bit of screen time. Very little of it is entirely passive.
The closest she gets to passive is watching Frozen and Frozen II, her latest favorites. She’s constantly explaining the movie to us, singing, dancing, and otherwise more using it as a launching pad for activities than just passively consuming it.
When she watches other things it usually involves myself or my wife discussing the show with her as it’s going. Asking questions, making observations, etc. She’s practicing and developing understanding and communication skills.
When she’s playing on a tablet, it’s usually stuff like Duo ABC where she’s learning and then demonstrating understanding of letters and words or games where she’s playing with the sort of equivalent of a virtual interactive dollhouse and is exercising her imagination making up stories and social interactions and then relaying the stories to us.
We don’t really pay attention to how _much_ screen time she gets as much as what she’s getting out of it. I definitely think she’s had more than her share of “4+ hours” days. But any study that doesn’t differentiate what we’re doing from a kid being left unattended and ignored with some YouTube recommendations all day seems to be… incomplete if I’m being polite.
> At some point, this seems to be less about screen time and more about lack of engagement and active involvement with your kids.
When we were told, as many parents are, “no screen time / limited screen time for kids” I didn’t accept it at face value but instead went digging for what the justification for this advice was.
From what I found you hit the nail on the head. The damage comes from the lack of interaction. Small children are absolute sponges and need to be around and observing and interacting with older children or adults to have the opportunity to sponge up how to be a human and then practice those skills. Plopping them in front of a TV doesn’t accomplish that. Especially when they’re quite young they’re not even able to comprehend the TV as much more than colors and sounds and get nothing.