Kids copy everything we do, including our relationships with our devices.
While doomscrolling on a smartphone certainly is not the healthiest way for an adult to spend their spare time, for young children, screen time means missing out on many vital moments to develop their language skills, researchers in Australia warn.
During time spent in front of the tablet or console, kids interact less with adults, absorbing fewer words from their parents and listening to more occasional conversations, a vital element to building up their own language skills. Amid this habit, language learning can consequently be delayed, scientists say in an article published in the JAMA Pediatrics journal.
Several studies have shown that it is key for a child's language acquisition and socio-emotional development to talk to and interact with them at home, the researchers say.
However, many of those studies have focused on the impact of the parents' screen time and not the child's.
For their study, the team led by Mary Brushe from Australia's University of Adelaide looked at data from 220 families recorded every six months from January 2018 to December 2021 using speech recognition technology.
The recordings included both the screen time and the general language environment at home of 12- to 36-month-old children during an average 16-hour day.
The researchers found that every increase in screen time translates to a decrease in parent-child conversations, meaning the child heard fewer words by the adults in their household, spoke less themselves and took part less frequently in conversations.
The biggest impact of screen time in that regard was observed at 36 months.
Even in families adhering to the screen time recommendations issued by the World Health Organisation (WHO), which is not more than an hour per day for a 3-year-old, kids might miss out on as much as 400 adult words per day.
However, according to estimates, the actual average screen time for many children is much higher.
The 3-year-olds observed for the study spent an average of 172 minutes in front of a screen every day, meaning they lose out on an average of 1,000 words directed toward them by an adult, the researchers said.
However, whether children who spent long hours in front of a screen had a smaller vocabulary and poorer language skills was not the subject of the study.
The research team said that growing up in a linguistically rich environment is vital for early language development.
While talking to children should be simple and uncomplicated enough, making time for proper conversation often isn't easy in the hustle and bustle of everyday life, they added.
So, while it's unrealistic to call on families to keep their kids away from the screen entirely, parents should instead be encouraged to use their children's screen time as an opportunity to interact with them, according to the researchers.
