Increasing Use, Younger Ages

Digital media is increasingly used by children during these early years of brain development. This increased use reflects both the increasing use of screen media by families and society and the growing marketing of cable TV channels, digital devices, and applications (apps) to young children, even to those from disadvantaged households.

For example, since the Kaiser Family Foundation first started surveying parents of 0 to 8 year olds about family technology use, usage by young children has increased year by year. In 2011, 52% of children aged 0 to 8 years had access to a mobile device and 38% had ever used one. This percentage increased to 75% of 0- to 8-year-old children having access to mobile devices in 2013. At that point, most mobile device use was reportedly to play games, use apps, or watch videos, averaging only 15 minutes per day. Children younger than 2 years were primarily still watching TV and DVDs.

Since then, a nationwide survey showed that 0 to 8 year olds are using an average of 3 hours of screen media per day ( Table 1 ), primarily watching TV or videos. A smaller study conducted in a low-income urban pediatric clinic in 2015 showed that almost all (97%) 0 to 4 year olds had used a mobile device, and three-quarters owned their own device. What is even more striking about these results is evidence that media multitasking starts at less than 4 years of age, that the youngest children queried had almost universal exposure to mobile devices in infancy (92% of 1 year olds), and that most young children were primarily using mobile devices for entertainment, not educational, purposes.

Changing Content

Although apps and games created for children have been the fastest growing section of app stores, their usage has been hard to accurately measure in research studies. Most parents report that their young children stream videos or play apps and games on mobile devices. For example, in Kabali and colleagues (2015) most children were reported to primarily watch YouTube or Netflix, whereas smaller proportions watched educational TV programs, played educational apps, or played games.

Parent Mediation Is More Challenging

With these changes in content, it is even more important that parents monitor what their children are consuming and help them learn from it, which has long been recommended for TV and videos. However, many parents report that mobile devices, which are handheld and usually used individually, are more difficult to monitor in terms of what the child is playing or downloading as well as where and when they are using media. Instant accessibility now means that children can demand preferred programs at any time or place. For example, Hiniker and colleagues surveyed parents of children and teens and found that context-based rules (ie, where children are allowed to use digital media, such as the dinner table) were the hardest to enforce compared with rules about time limits and content ( Fig. 1 ).

Parents’ reported ability to enforce screen time rules at home.

( From Hiniker A, Schoenebeck S, Kientz J. Not at the dinner table: parents’ and children’s perspectives on family technology rules. CSCW ’16 Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing, pages 1376-1389; with permission.)

The Changing Digital Divide

Although the digital divide between higher- and lower-income families has been narrowed in terms of mobile technology ownership, disparities still exist in many domains. For example, in a national survey of families, Wartella found that low-income families were more likely to be the media-centric families ( Table 2 ) whose households are saturated with background media throughout the day, which is known to disrupt child play and interactions with parents. A recent survey by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop found that digital resources were usually not well guided to ensure educational progress in low-income communities. Similarly, the 2013 Zero to Eight survey found disparities in use of educational mobile media by income; 54% of higher income children often or sometimes used educational content on mobile devices, whereas only 28% of lower income children did.

Cognitive Development

The ability of young children to learn from screen media is largely age dependent ( Table 3 ). For children younger than 2 years, when children are still in Piaget’s sensorimotor stage of development, their understanding of content on 2-dimensional screens is limited. For example, infants can imitate and recall actions performed by a person on a screen or imitate sign language from videos but cannot learn new knowledge (eg, novel words, solve puzzles) at less than 30 months of age without a real-life adult helping them learn. At this age, it is thought that attentional controls and symbolic thinking are too immature for children to be able to transfer knowledge from screen to 3-dimensional life.

Although it is possible that the interactivity of touch screens may make them more educational for infants and toddlers, research has only shown that children as young as 24 months can learn from videochat or carefully designed touch screens. No research has been conducted on children younger than 2 years as of yet. However, it is worth noting that the interactivity of touch screens is limited compared with teaching from an adult. Adults are able to read and respond contingently to the knowledge, behavior, and affective state of children to be able to teach them on their learning edge—what Vygotsky (1978) termed the zone of proximal development —where the greatest amount of learning can occur. Even the most tailored educational apps and games do not have this complex capacity.

Higher-Order Thinking: the Executive Functions

Executive functions, which start to develop at about 4 years of age but are rooted in experiences as early as infancy, predict early school success and college graduation rates independent of intelligence. Executive functions, such as task persistence, impulse control, emotion regulation, and creative, flexible thinking, are influenced through positive parenting as well as child-led play ; but a growing body of literature is examining whether brain training computer games can improve these mental capacities. In children aged 6 years and older, there is early evidence that intensive computerized working memory training may be effective for children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or prematurity. However, results are conflicting. Experts in the field have warned that children may not generalize such digital skills to their everyday environments or that the closed-loop of app-based learning teaches less critical thinking.

Language and Literacy

A large body of research has examined whether high-quality educational programming can teach children language and early literacy skills. As noted earlier, children younger than 2.5 years cannot learn novel words from videos without parents coviewing and using the same words in everyday interactions. However, by preschool age, well-designed traditional and interactive educational digital media can teach children language and literacy skills. Similarly, studies show that children learn content knowledge and vocabulary equally from digital books and print books, as long as formal features of the digital books support the learning objectives, rather than distract from them.

However, it is important to understand whether the use of digital books engages children in more solo reading, at the expense of shared parent-child reading experiences. Some studies show that, when reading digital books with young children, parents use fewer dialogic reading strategies, such as labeling objects, asking open-ended questions, and commenting on the story beyond the actual pictures, but instead comment on the digital device itself (eg, tap that…push this). Because active parent involvement in digital play or e-book reading improves children’s learning, it is important that shared parent-child experiences not be displaced.

Social-Emotional Development

Play is central to child social-emotional development because it provides a special opportunity for affective exchanges and enriched experiences between parents and children. It allows parents a window into their child’s thoughts and conflicts, lets them follow the child’s lead, and, thus, builds social reciprocity. However, background TV has been shown to distract from parent-child interaction and child play. This distraction has been proposed as one of the mechanisms by which screen exposure negatively influences child social-emotional development (see section on child development).

However, certain forms of digital play or creation may be effective at bringing a parent into a child’s world, for example, a child taking photos or videos and then showing them to a parent, or audio recording/illustrating stories together. Regarding social skills, evidence shows that quality TV programs, such as Sesame Street and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood , improve children’s understanding of concepts, including friendship, feelings, and how to treat other people. Although some interactive apps have been developed to promote social-emotional skills, none have been formally tested.

Summing Up: The Importance of Adult Interaction and Good Digital Design

For infants and toddlers younger than 24 to 30 months, the primary way children learn from passive or interactive media is through caregivers coviewing, teaching them about the content, and repeating this teaching through daily interactions. Thus, any digital media product that does not try to involve the caregiver is unlikely to be educational at these younger ages.

In preschoolers, well-designed educational apps based on established curricula can be educational ; but most of the commercially available apps marketed as educational have no evidence to back up this claim. In fact, recent reviews of the most popular or highest-rated educational apps in iTunes showed that most have no input from developmental scientists, are not based on curricula, and target only simple skills (eg, colors, ABCs). Thus, academic and industry leaders have recently issued recommendations for app design that include (1) fewer distracting features, so that children can truly engage with learning content; (2) design for a dual audience (ie, both parent and child) to facilitate family participation in media use ; and (3) features that allow the child to transfer their knowledge to the physical and social world around them.