Ernie Mundell, writing for Health Day, reports on research findings concerning toddlers amount of screen time and how it may impact on their interaction with parents or other caregivers.

In short, the study showed that using TVs and tablets as “e-babysitters” significantly cuts down on the time toddlers spend interacting with parents or other caregivers.

The Australian team of investigators are calling the phenomenon “technoference”—a scenario where “young children’s exposure to screen time is interfering with opportunities to talk and interact in their home environment.”

Current guidelines from the American Academy of Pediatrics for kids ages 2 to 5 recommend “no more than one hour per day [of media use], to allow children ample time to engage in other activities important to their health and development.”

Unfortunately, many toddlers are being exposed to screens at much higher rates than that.

“Increases in screen time were associated with decreases in measures of parent-child talk,” the researchers found.

By the age of 3, the average child in the study was watching some type of screen for two hours and 52 minutes each day.

And “for every additional minute of screen time, children heard fewer adult words, spoke fewer vocalizations and engaged in fewer back-and-forth interactions,” the researchers found.

Put more concretely, by the age of 3 every extra minute spent looking at a TV or computer screen was linked to 6.6 fewer words spoken with an adult that day.

Parents may not be aware of the impact of screen time on kids’ development and may need to understand the potential association of screen time with opportunities for children and adults to talk and interact in their home environment.

More information: Find out more about media’s impact on your toddler at the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Mary E. Brushe et al, Screen Time and Parent-Child Talk When Children Are Aged 12 to 36 Months, JAMA Pediatrics (2024). DOI: 10.1001/jamapediatrics.2023.6790

Journal information: JAMA Pediatrics 

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