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On a chilly day last spring, a few dozen developers of childrens apps for phones and tablets gathered at an old beach resort in Monterey, California, to show off their games. One developer, a self-described visionary for puzzles who looked like a skateboarder-recently-turned-dad, displayed a jacked-up, interactive game called Puzzingo, intended for toddlers and inspired by his own sons desire to build and smash. Two 30 something women were eagerly seeking feedback for an app called Knock Knock Family, aimed at 1-to-4-year-olds. We want to make sure its easy enough for babies to understand, one explained.
The gathering was organized by Warren Buckleitner, a longtime reviewer of interactive childrens media who likes to bring together developers, researchers, and interest groupsand often plenty of kids, some still in diapers. It went by the Harry Potterish name Dust or Magic, and was held in a drafty old stone-and-wood hall barely a mile from the sea, the kind of place where Bathilda Bagshot might retire after packing up her wand. Buckleitner spent the breaks testing whether his own remote-control helicopter could reach the halls second story, while various children who had come with their parents looked up in awe and delight. But mostly they looked down, at the iPads and other tablets displayed around the hall like so many open boxes of candy. I walked around and talked with developers, and several paraphrased a famous saying of Maria Montessoris, a quote imported to ennoble a touch-screen age when very young kids, who once could be counted on only to chew on a square of aluminum, are now engaging with it in increasingly sophisticated ways: The hands are the instruments of mans intelligence.
What, really, would Maria Montessori have made of this scene? The 30 or so children here were not down at the shore poking their fingers in the sand or running them along mossy stones or digging for hermit crabs. Instead they were all inside, alone or in groups of two or three, their faces a few inches from a screen, their hands doing things Montessori surely did not imagine. A couple of 3-year-old girls were leaning against a pair of French doors, reading an interactive story called Ten Giggly Gorillas and fighting over which ape to tickle next. A boy in a nearby corner had turned his fingertip into a red marker to draw an ugly picture of his older brother. On an old oak table at the front of the room, a giant stuffed Angry Bird beckoned the children to come and test out tablets loaded with dozens of new apps. Some of the chairs had pillows strapped to them, since an 18-month-old might not otherwise be able to reach the table, though shed know how to swipe once she did.
Not that long ago, there was only the television, which theoretically could be kept in the parents bedroom or locked behind a cabinet. Now there are smartphones and iPads, which wash up in the domestic clutter alongside keys and gum and stray hair ties. Mom, everyone has technology but me! my 4-year-old son sometimes wails. And why shouldnt he feel entitled? In the same span of time it took him to learn how to say that sentence, thousands of kids apps have been developedthe majority aimed at preschoolers like him. To us , American childhood has undergone a somewhat alarming transformation in a very short time. But to him, it has always been possible to do so many things with the swipe of a finger, to have hundreds of games packed into a gadget the same size as Goodnight Moon.
In 2011, the American Academy of Pediatrics updated its policy on very young children and media. In 1999, the group had discouraged television viewing for children younger than 2, citing research on brain development that showed this age groups critical need for direct interactions with parents and other significant care givers. The updated report began by acknowledging that things had changed significantly since then. In 2006, 90 percent of parents said that their children younger than 2 consumed some form of electronic media. Nonetheless, the group took largely the same approach it did in 1999, uniformly discouraging passive media use, on any type of screen, for these kids. The 2011 report mentioned smart cell phone and new screen technologies, but did not address interactive apps. Nor did it broach the possibility that has likely occurred to those 90 percent of American parents, queasy though they might be: that some good might come from those little swiping fingers.
I had come to the developers conference partly because I hoped that this particular set of parents, enthusiastic as they were about interactive media, might help me out of this conundrum, that they might offer some guiding principle for American parents who are clearly never going to meet the academys ideals, and at some level do not want to. Perhaps this group would be able to articulate some benefits of the new technology that the more cautious pediatricians werent ready to address. I nurtured this hope until about lunchtime, when the developers gathering in the dining hall ceased being visionaries and reverted to being ordinary parents, trying to settle their toddlers in high chairs and get them to eat something besides bread.
I fell into conversation with a woman who had helped develop Montessori Letter Sounds, an app that teaches preschoolers the Montessori methods of spelling.
She was a former Montessori teacher and a mother of four. I myself have three children who are all fans of the touch screen. What games did her kids like to play?, I asked, hoping for suggestions I could take home.
They dont play all that much.
Really? Why not?
Because I dont allow it. We have a rule of no screen time during the week, unless its clearly educational.
No screen time? None at all? That seems at the outer edge of restrictive, even by the standards of my overcontrolling parenting set.
On the weekends, they can play. I give them a limit of half an hour and then stop. Enough. It can be too addictive, too stimulating for the brain.
Her answer so surprised me that I decided to ask some of the other developers who were also parents what their domestic ground rules for screen time were. One said only on airplanes and long car rides. Another said Wednesdays and weekends, for half an hour. The most permissive said half an hour a day, which was about my rule at home. At one point I sat with one of the biggest developers of e-book apps for kids, and his family. The toddler was starting to fuss in her high chair, so the mom did what many of us have done at that momentstuck an iPad in front of her and played a short movie so everyone else could enjoy their lunch. When she saw me watching, she gave me the universal tense look of mothers who feel they are being judged. At home, she assured me, I only let her watch movies in Spanish.
By their pinched reactions, these parents illuminated for me the neurosis of our age: as technology becomes ubiquitous in our lives, American parents are becoming more, not less, wary of what it might be doing to their children. Technological competence and sophistication have not, for parents, translated into comfort and ease. They have merely created yet another sphere that parents feel they have to navigate in exactly the right way. On the one hand, parents want their children to swim expertly in the digital stream that they will have to navigate all their lives; on the other hand, they fear that too much digital media, too early, will sink them. Parents end up treating tablets like precision surgical instruments, gadgets that might perform miracles for their childs IQ and help him win some nifty robotics competitionbut only if they are used just so. Otherwise, their child could end up one of those sad, pale creatures who cant make eye contact and has an avatar for a girlfriend.
Norman Rockwell never painted Boy Swiping Finger on Screen, and our own vision of a perfect childhood has never adjusted to accommodate that now-common tableau. Add to that our modern fear that every parenting decision may have lasting consequencesthat every minute of enrichment lost or mindless entertainment indulged will add up to some permanent handicap in the futureand you have deep guilt and confusion. To date, no body of research has definitively proved that the iPad will make your preschooler smarter or teach her to speak Chinese, or alternatively that it will rust her neural circuitrythe device has been out for only three years, not much more than the time it takes some academics to find funding and gather research subjects. So whats a parent to do?
In 2001, the education and technology writer Marc Prensky popularized the term digital natives to describe the first generations of children growing up fluent in the language of computers, video games, and other technologies. This term took on a whole new significance in April 2010, when the iPad was released. iPhones had already been tempting young children, but the screens were a little small for pudgy toddler hands to navigate with ease and accuracy. Plus, parents tended to be more possessive of their phones, hiding them in pockets or purses. The iPad was big and bright, and a case could be made that it belonged to the family. Researchers who study childrens media immediately recognized it as a game changer.
Previously, young children had to be shown by their parents how to use a mouse or a remote, and the connection between what they were doing with their hand and what was happening on the screen took some time to grasp. But with the iPad, the connection is obvious, even to toddlers. Touch technology follows the same logic as shaking a rattle or knocking down a pile of blocks: the child swipes, and something immediately happens. A rattle on steroids, is what Buckleitner calls it. All of a sudden a finger could move a bus or smush an insect or turn into a big wet gloopy paintbrush. To a toddler, this is less magic than intuition. At a very young age, children become capable of what the psychologist Jerome Bruner called enactive representation they classify objects in the world not by using words or symbols but by making gesturessay, holding an imaginary cup to their lips to signify that they want a drink. Their hands are a natural extension of their thoughts.
Norman Rockwell never painted Boy Swiping Finger on Screen, and our own vision of a perfect childhood has never adjusted to fit that now-common tableau.
I have two older children who fit the early idea of a digital nativethey learned how to use a mouse or a keyboard with some help from their parents and were well into school before they felt comfortable with a device in their lap. My youngest child is a whole different story. He was not yet 2 when the iPad was released. As soon as he got his hands on it, he located the Talking Baby Hippo app that one of my older children had downloaded. The little purple hippo repeats whatever you say in his own squeaky voice, and responds to other cues. My son said his name ; Baby Hippo repeated it back. Gideon poked Baby Hippo; Baby Hippo laughed. Over and over, it was funny every time. Pretty soon he discovered other apps. Old MacDonald, by Duck Duck Moose, was a favorite. At first he would get frustrated trying to zoom between screens, or not knowing what to do when a message popped up. But after about two weeks, he figured all that out. I must admit, it was eerie to see a child still in diapers so competent and intent, as if he were forecasting his own adulthood. Technically I was the owner of the iPad, but in some ontological way it felt much more his than mine.
Without seeming to think much about it or resolve how they felt, parents began giving their devices over to their children to mollify, pacify, or otherwise entertain them. By 2010, two-thirds of children ages 4 to 7 had used an iPhone, according to the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, which studies childrens media. The vast majority of those phones had been lent by a family member; the centers researchers labeled this the pass-back effect, a name that captures well the reluctant zone between denying and giving.
The market immediately picked up on the pass-back effect, and the opportunities it presented. In 2008, when Apple opened up its App Store, the games started arriving at the rate of dozens a day, thousands a year. For the first 23 years of his career, Buckleitner had tried to be comprehensive and cover every childrens game in his publication, Childrens Technology Review. Now, by Buckleitners loose count, more than 40,000 kids games are available on iTunes, plus thousands more on Google Play. In the iTunes Education category, the majority of the top-selling apps target preschool or elementary-age children. By age 3, Gideon would go to preschool and tune in to what was cool in toddler world, then come home, locate the iPad, drop it in my lap, and ask for certain games by their approximate description: Tea? Spill?
As these delights and diversions for young children have proliferated, the pass-back has become more uncomfortable, even unsustainable, for many parents:
Hed gone to this state where youd call his name and he wouldnt respond to it, or you could snap your fingers in front of his face
But, you know, we ended up actually taking the iPad away forfrom him largely because, you know, this example, this thing we were talking about, about zoning out. Now, he would do that, and my wife and I would stare at him and think, Oh my God, his brain is going to turn to mush and come oozing out of his ears. And it concerned us a bit.
This is Ben Worthen, a Wall Street Journal reporter, explaining recently to NPRs Diane Rehm why he took the iPad away from his son, even though it was the only thing that could hold the boys attention for long periods, and it seemed to be sparking an interest in numbers and letters. Most parents can sympathize with the disturbing sight of a toddler, who five minutes earlier had been jumping off the couch, now subdued and staring at a screen, seemingly hypnotized. In the somewhat alarmist Endangered Minds: Why Children Dont Thinkand What We Can Do About It, author Jane Healy even gives the phenomenon a name, the zombie effect, and raises the possibility that television might suppress mental activity by putting viewers in a trance.
Ever since viewing screens entered the home, many observers have worried that they put our brains into a stupor. An early strain of research claimed that when we watch television, our brains mostly exhibit slow alpha wavesindicating a low level of arousal, similar to when we are daydreaming. These findings have been largely discarded by the scientific community, but the myth persists that watching television is the mental equivalent of, as one Web site put it, staring at a blank wall. These common metaphors are misleading, argues Heather Kirkorian, who studies media and attention at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. A more accurate point of comparison for a TV viewers physiological state would be that of someone deep in a book, says Kirkorian, because during both activities we are still, undistracted, and mentally active.
Because interactive media are so new, most of the existing research looks at children and television. By now, there is universal agreement that by at least age 2 and a half, children are very cognitively active when they are watching TV, says Dan Anderson, a childrens-media expert at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. In the 1980s, Anderson put the zombie theory to the test, by subjecting roughly 100 children to a form of TV hell. He showed a group of children ages 2 to 5 a scrambled version of Sesame Street: he pieced together scenes in random order, and had the characters speak backwards or in Greek. Then he spliced the doctored segments with unedited ones and noted how well the kids paid attention. The children looked away much more frequently during the scrambled parts of the show, and some complained that the TV was broken. Anderson later repeated the experiment with babies ages 6 months to 24 months, using Teletubbies. Once again he had the characters speak backwards and chopped the action sequences into a nonsensical ordershowing, say, one of the Teletubbies catching a ball and then, after that, another one throwing it. The 6- and 12-month-olds seemed unable to tell the difference, but by 18 months the babies started looking away, and by 24 months they were turned off by programming that did not make sense.
Andersons series of experiments provided the first clue that even very young children can be discriminating viewersthat they are not in fact brain-dead, but rather work hard to make sense of what they see and turn it into a coherent narrative that reflects what they already know of the world. Now, 30 years later, we understand that children can make a lot of inferences and process the information, says Anderson. And they can learn a lot, both positive and negative. Researchers never abandoned the idea that parental interaction is critical for the development of very young children. But they started to see TV watching in shades of gray. If a child never interacts with adults and always watches TV, well, that is a problem. But if a child is watching TV instead of, say, playing with toys, then that is a tougher comparison, because TV, in the right circumstances, has something to offer.
How do small children actually experience electronic media, and what does that experience do to their development? Since the 80s, researchers have spent more and more time consulting with television programmers to study and shape TV content. By tracking childrens reactions, they have identified certain rules that promote engagement: stories have to be linear and easy to follow, cuts and time lapses have to be used very sparingly, and language has to be pared down and repeated. A perfect example of a well-engineered show is Nick Jr.s Blues Clues, which aired from 1996 to 2006. Each episode features Steve and Blue, a cartoon puppy, solving a mystery. Steve talks slowly and simply; he repeats words and then writes them down in his handy-dandy notebook. There are almost no cuts or unexplained gaps in time. The great innovation of Blues Clues is something called the pause. Steve asks a question and then pauses for about five seconds to let the viewer shout out an answer. Small children feel much more engaged and invested when they think they have a role to play, when they believe they are actually helping Steve and Blue piece together the clues. A longitudinal study of children older than 2 and a half showed that the ones who watched Blues Clues made measurably larger gains in flexible thinking and problem solving over two years of watching the show.
For toddlers, however, the situation seems slightly different. Children younger than 2 and a half exhibit what researchers call a video deficit. This means that they have a much easier time processing information delivered by a real person than by a person on videotape. In one series of studies, conducted by Georgene Troseth, a developmental psychologist at Vanderbilt University, children watched on a live video monitor as a person in the next room hid a stuffed dog. Others watched the exact same scene unfold directly, through a window between the rooms. The children were then unleashed into the room to find the toy. Almost all the kids who viewed the hiding through the window found the toy, but the ones who watched on the monitor had a much harder time.
