As the COVID-19 outbreak continues across the world, it has inevitably led to the closure of schools and education centers. Children are expected to continue their learning remotely through virtual engagements and digital tools with their teachers. This shift from traditional physical lessons have caused certain anxiety in adults as they worry about juggling between work from home and supporting their children in this new way of learning.
Many popular press coverage often highlight studies showing associations between hours of “screen time” and negative outcomes. Many parents grew concerned about their children’s use of media and technology, as they worry about how the sudden exposure to screen time might affect their child’s learning. For example, some studies show that media exposure during preschool or toddlerhood could be detrimental to children’s language and literacy skills because it may displace other language-enhancing activities like shared reading with parents and creative play with siblings (Clarke & Kurtz-Costes, 1997).
How much of this is true?
It may be useful to note that previous studies were only testing for linear relations and may miss out meaningful associations that manifest as quadratic relations. A linear association predicts whether an increase/decrease in A is correlated with an increase/decrease in B while quadratic associations may not be as straightforward. In a longitudinal study by Rebecca Ansley Dore and colleagues (2020), they found that pre-school children with moderate media usage had the largest language gains, while both the lowest and the highest levels of media usage are associated with lesser language gains.
Photo taken from ‘Characteristics of Children’s Media Use and Gains in Language and Literacy Skills’ (Dore, Logan, Lin, Purtell & Justice, 2020)
This graph shows the association between weekly media use and language gains. Each vertical or standing line along the X-axis (at the bottom) represents one child. A quadratic graph such as this one suggests that the relationship between performance on a language learning task (in this case, the WJ Picture Vocabulary Task) and how much media a child used is not as straightforward or ‘linear’ as we may think it is!
Surprisingly, children’s literacy and language skills were not hindered by the proportions of media time exposure, but rather moderate amounts of media usage might even be useful for their language growth.
On the other hand, families who limit media use to extremely low levels may not be replacing that time with other joint literacy activities such as shared reading and singing of nursery songs, and this in turn may lead to poorer language growth.
This suggests that media use may have a negative effect on language growth, but only if it inhibits caregiver-child interaction and caregiver language input. This means that joint media engagement may moderate the association between children’s media use and language skills.
Hence, if working parents are too busy with their work, screen time may still offer learning opportunities for children, improving their receptive vocabulary, comprehension, and communicative skills. Even the actions of touchscreen scrolling may develop a toddler’s fine motor skills, which is important for them to perform important tasks such as feeding themselves, writing and more (Bedford et al., 2016).
Although family literacy interventions such as shared reading and singing still play an important role in the language acquisition of the children, the results of this study shows that media usage does not necessarily hinder a child’s language and literacy skills. With moderation, it may even value-add to the child’s learning. What great news for busy parents!
This article was written by our intern Yanlin and edited by lab manager Fei Ting and research assistant Shaza.
BLIP Lab is currently recruiting families with children from ages 0-4 years for our upcoming Baby Talk-a-thon! Sign up here: https://ntuhss.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_868i1NIkpvf00QK
More information about our Talk-a-thon: https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/blip/baby/talkathon/
Adapted from:
Dore, R. A., Logan, J., Lin, T.-J., Purtell, K. M., & Justice, L. (2020, August 10). Characteristics of Children’s Media Use and Gains in Language and Literacy Skills. Frontiers. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.02224/full#h3
Other references:
Bedford, R., Saez de Urabain, I. R., Cheung, C. H. M., Karmiloff-Smith, A., & Smith, T. J. (2016, July 11). Toddlers’ Fine Motor Milestone Achievement Is Associated with Early Touchscreen Scrolling. Frontiers. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01108/full
Clarke, A. T., & Kurtz-Costes, B. (1997). Television Viewing, Educational Quality of the Home Environment, and School Readiness. The Journal of Educational Research, 90(5), 279–285. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220671.1997.10544584
You might also be interested in “Screens and kids: is screen time bad for language development?” https://www.mpi-talkling.mpi.nl/?p=1277&lang=en