When it comes to kids and screens, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) advises parents that less is best. In fact, children younger than 18 months should have no screen time at all, according to the AAP.
The one exception? Video chat.
I admit that I didn’t have this advice in mind when my son Oliver was ten months old and I got the idea to tape my smartphone to the back of the passenger seat of my car, directly in front of his car seat. From that day, I would pick him up from daycare, put him in his car seat, turn on my phone and call my mother and stepfather, who lived in another time zone, via FaceTime.
They sang songs and read books to him and made him laugh during our drive home. The setup was great. Oliver was entertained, and my parents had a chance to be a part of his day before they went to bed. It became a special experience for all of us (perhaps a bit less so for me as I was driving, but I loved overhearing the interaction.)
About a year later, Oliver and I moved to Berlin for my sabbatical from the University of Washington. We no longer had a car for post-daycare video chats, but I soon discovered that having one of his two sets of grandparents read a few books on my laptop was an effective way to keep a very wriggly toddler in his seat at lunchtime. It also helped Oliver stay connected to his family over a long distance.
I’m not the only parent who makes an exception to screen limits when it comes to video chatting with loved ones. Even parents who are normally quite restrictive of their kids’ technology use seem to put video chat in a different category of screens.1McClure, E., Chentsova-Dutton, Y., Barr, R., Holochwost, S., & Parrott, W. (2016). FaceTime doesn’t count: Video chat as an exception to media restrictions for infants and toddlers. International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction, 6. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijcci.2016.02.002 Like the AAP, parents recognize the value of connecting with family and friends, especially when geography (or a global pandemic) makes in-person visits difficult.
Connecting with grandma and grandpa is a good in itself, of course, but video chat may offer even more than a chance for family bonding.
In 2013, researchers Sarah Roseberry, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, and Roberta Golinkoff conducted the first study to examine young children’s word learning through video chat technology.2Roseberry, S., Hirsh-Pasek, K., & Golinkoff, R. M. (2014). Skype me! Socially Contingent Interactions Help Toddlers Learn Language. Child Development, 85(3), 956–970. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12166 They brought children between the ages of two and two-and-a-half into their lab and taught them a series of new words in one of three different ways. Some children were taught by an adult via Skype, others were taught by an adult in person, and the third group was taught by watching a prerecorded video of an adult teaching another child.
The researchers had good reason to believe that the two-year-olds wouldn’t have much success learning new words by watching a prerecorded video. This is because very young children typically learn better when information is presented to them live and in-person versus screen-based and prerecorded—researchers call this the video deficit effect.3Anderson, D. R., & Pempek, T. A. (2005). Television and Very Young Children. American Behavioral Scientist, 48(5), 505–522. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764204271506
But what about interacting with an adult via Skype? Like the children watching the prerecorded video, children using Skype had a two-dimensional experience, which can be difficult for young children to translate back to three-dimensional space.4Troseth, G. L., & DeLoache, J. S. (1998). The medium can obscure the message: Young children’s understanding of video. Child Development, 69(4), 950–965. https://doi.org/10.2307/1132355 However, the Skype group also shared an important quality with the in-person group: back-and-forth, real-time, and personalized dialogue between an adult and the child.
The researchers discovered that children using Skype learned new words just as well as children who interacted with an adult in person. Those children who watched the prerecorded video had considerably more difficulty. Skype turned out to be more like interacting with an adult in person than watching one on a screen.
Unlike watching a TV show or interacting with an app on a tablet or phone, video chat offers children a socially contingent experience. There’s a back and forth between the child and another person who responds directly to what the child says and does. Importantly, that other person brings to the interaction everything they know about the child—their likes and dislikes, past experiences, skills they’ve mastered and skills they’re still working on.
In contrast, interacting with an app or e-book on a tablet is non-socially contingent—the app may be responsive to the child’s actions, but its responses are pre-programmed and have nothing to do with the individual child and what makes them them. The app will never say “Hey! this part of the story reminds me of the time we visited the zoo together” or “This picture looks like something your mother drew when she was your age.”
Socially contingent interactions are tailored to individual children’s distinct temperament, recent experiences, relationships, abilities, and preferences.5Beier, J. S., & Carey, S. (2014). Contingency is not enough: Social context guides third-party attributions of intentional agency. Developmental Psychology, 50(3), 889–902. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0034171 This tailoring is why video chat is fundamentally different from watching TV. It’s also why caregivers play such a crucial role in supporting children’s early development. The personal touch they’re able to give makes all the difference when it comes to learning.
The personalized interactions that set video chat apart from other technologies seem to warrant the exception that both the AAP and parents make when it comes to setting screen time rules.
But this discussion raises another, perhaps bigger, question. If not all forms of screen time are created equal, is “screen time” even the right thing to be talking about when it comes to the limits parents set on their kids’ technology use? After all, screen time doesn’t translate particularly well to technologies like Siri and Alexa, which don’t even require a screen to interact with.
Screen time may be a useful shorthand for parents to carve out some general rules, but the concept has its limits. There’s value in getting more nuanced when it comes to establishing expectations, norms, and rules around your child’s technology use.
* This post was adapted from chapter 3 of Technology’s Child.
Notes:
- 1McClure, E., Chentsova-Dutton, Y., Barr, R., Holochwost, S., & Parrott, W. (2016). FaceTime doesn’t count: Video chat as an exception to media restrictions for infants and toddlers. International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction, 6. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijcci.2016.02.002
- 2Roseberry, S., Hirsh-Pasek, K., & Golinkoff, R. M. (2014). Skype me! Socially Contingent Interactions Help Toddlers Learn Language. Child Development, 85(3), 956–970. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12166
- 3Anderson, D. R., & Pempek, T. A. (2005). Television and Very Young Children. American Behavioral Scientist, 48(5), 505–522. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764204271506
- 4Troseth, G. L., & DeLoache, J. S. (1998). The medium can obscure the message: Young children’s understanding of video. Child Development, 69(4), 950–965. https://doi.org/10.2307/1132355
- 5Beier, J. S., & Carey, S. (2014). Contingency is not enough: Social context guides third-party attributions of intentional agency. Developmental Psychology, 50(3), 889–902. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0034171
