Nowadays, we are glued to our smartphones. Whether we used it for work purposes, studies or entertainment, we always keep our phones within reach. But how does this effect people around us, specifically children?
When parents use their phones in front of their children, they are distracted and tend to ignore them. Researchers used the Still Face Paradigm and posed that the unresponsiveness of parents negatively effects the social-emotional development of children (Myruski et al., 2017).
The Still Face Experiment was conducted for the first time in 1975 by Edward Tronick and his collegues. They let a child interact with his or her mother, the latter not responding or showing any expression. The child tried, unsuccesfully, to make contact with his or her mother for three minutes. The child became distressed, but did not stop trying to interact with the mother. In the end, the child turns away from his mother with a clearly distraught facial expression (Fulwiler, 2013).
Myruski et al. (2017) repeated this experiment, but added the use of phones. The children reacted negatively when the parents withdrew attention by using their phones. The sprouts were less interested in their toys, engaged less with the parent and were less inclined to explore the room they were in.
But with the ever growing need to be available through our mobile phones for work or studies, it seems impossible to put our phones away when we get home. Moreover, tablets are used in the education system at an increasingly young age anyway: iPad’s are already being used in education of toddlers (4 years old). According to Apple’s study, toddler’s reading skills increased after the implementation of the iPad in kindergarten class (Apple, 2017).
So why not let children get used to mass mobile device use as soon as possible? Would you expose your future children to mobile devices at a young age?
References
Apple (2017). iPad in het onderwijs: wereldwijde resultaten. [online] Apple, p.4. Available at: https://www.apple.com/nl/education/docs/ipad-in-education-results.pdf [Accessed 2 Oct. 2019].
Fulwiler, M. (2013). The Research: The Still Face Experiment. [online] The Gottman Institute. Available at: https://www.gottman.com/blog/research-still-face-experiment/ [Accessed 2 Oct. 2019].
Myruski, S., Gulyayeva, O., Birk, S., Pérez-Edgar, K., Buss, K. and Dennis-Tiwary, T. (2017). Digital disruption? Maternal mobile device use is related to infant social-emotional functioning. Developmental Science, [online] 21(4), p.e12610. Available at: http://file:///C:/Users/Romaana/Downloads/Myruski_et_al-2018-Developmental_Science.pdf [Accessed 2 Oct. 2019].
Dear Romaana,
I was intrigued by your article and still am by the subject. If I’m not incorrect, your reasoning for letting children use mobile phones from an early age is because society demands of us (and them) that they be proficient in their use. However, I believe that you fail to mention that not being able develop as a child you abstain that child from other developments. Think of face-to-face contact, playing with our without rules, falling, discovering etc etc. Don’t you think that having a child that falls behind in those facets is worse of than one that has had less exposure to usage of a phone?
Kind regards,
Willem Prisse
Dear Willem,
Thank you for your reply. From my point of view, emotional skills are among the most important skills in life. I have a toddler of 2,5 years old and I try to keep my mobile devices and laptop as far as possible from him, because I want him to focus on his cognitive and social-emotional skill development. Unfortunately, I notice a lot of parents being proud at their toddler for how proficient they are in using tablets and smartphones. Their reasoning is that the smartphone agility will provide the child a head start at kindergarten. I also notice how my son often doesn’t have anyone to play with at family gatherings, as he is the only one who still plays with toys. This example shows how smartphone use among children decreases actual face-to-face interaction and the necessary development of emotional skills, as these children often don’t pity a little child playing all alone. This, I strongly agree with you and I’m glad you share my opinion on such an important topic.
All the best,
Romaana
Hi there,
Interesting post! It reaches me because my mother has been a kindergarten teacher for 44 years, so from her experiences I can share a bit about the trend she sees among younger generations, and I think those insights could shed light upon your story as well. It does take a bit of a side path though, and I don’t focus on the communication part between parents and their children, but only on the use of mobile devices among children at a young age.
The disconcerting problem is that children aged 0-5 are in a very important phase of their life to learn a lot about hand-eye coordination and precise use of your muscles etc… Children learn this through games such as playing with blocks (triangle in the triangular hole, circle in the circular hole, etc), or by stacking blocks. In these younger years they develop a lot of understanding of how to control their hands, feet, and other senses.
Nowadays, children are only playing games on mobile devices and as far as I can share my mother’s experience.. children have a lot of difficulties with physical objects, such as holding a pen. It’s a serious issue when they start learning to write at the age of 4-5 and they cannot control their hands well to hold a pen. The connection of your brains to your muscles are basically underdeveloped.
One could argue that we wouldn’t have to learn hand writing in the future, but there’s many other situations in which it could create issues if children don’t use their hands enough!
Best,
Marc
Dear Marc,
Thank you for your reply. I noticed the same trend when it comes to handwriting. My nephew, who is 12 years old, finds it extremely difficult to write in such a way that his teacher is able to read it. This saddens me, because the ill developed motoric skills are a result of the excessive mobile device use, which will lead to even more usage of mobile devices, because nobody is able to read his handwriting.
Lastly, much respect for your mother teaching small children for such a long time!
Kind regards,
Romaana
Hi Romaana,
Interesting article! The integration of smartphones in the lives of young children interests me a lot, as it does have major consequences in indeed the physical developmental issues, as well as the psychological consequences that are described in the article and the comments.
When I read your post I had to think about a moment a few years ago that really made me think about the new social norms smartphone access creates between children as well. I used to babysit a lot and one day one of the girls came down the stairs crying. I thought she might have fallen or something, but the reason she was upset was because she accidentally forgot to maintain a Snapchat streak with a friend from school. She was upset because she was afraid that her friend would be mad and disappointed in her and she felt she had been a bad friend. When I tried to comfort her and tell her that her friend would probably understand, she just would not take my word for it and told me about how Snapchat streaks really were a thing in her school. Her little brother agreed, and (very helpfully) told her it was stupid to forget about maintaining the streak.
I remember discussing this with my friends after, completely shocked about this entire new world of measuring friendship in Snapchat Streaks. We only grew up with 15 minutes of MSN per day, or playing The Sims every now and then. Unfortunately, there are many stories like this about instagram pressure, exclusion from WhatsApp groups etc. We talked about solutions, yet did not manage to find an ideal one. If you won’t allow your child access to a phone, will they be excluded? Miss everything- all the jokes, memes, snapchats? Will they be bullied for not owning a phone?
I guess we just have to keep trying to understand these new dynamics, and keep talking to the kids to see if we can help them with these issues. The Snapchat trend is probably already over now, but I wonder what new ‘trends’ exist in primary and high schools at the moment!
Thanks again for sharing! It’s inspire to think about this and how it may change in the future!
All the best,
Ilse