Speaking of Psychology: Raising children in the digital age, with Roberta Golinkoff, PhD

Touchscreen use among children is ubiquitous. But how much is too much, and is there an age before which you shouldn’t hand a child a smartphone or tablet? Roberta Golinkoff, PhD, discusses how this relatively new technology can help young children learn and why it’s different from television and books.

Roberta Golinkoffopens in new window holds the Unidel H. Rodney Sharp Chair in the school of education at the University of Delaware and is also a member of the departments of psychology and linguistics. She directs the childsplay learning and development lab, whose goal it is to understand how children learn language. Golinkoff has written dozens of journal articles, chapters and academic books and presents at conferences all over the world. She has also written books for a mainstream audience, such as “Becoming Brilliant,” published by the American Psychological Association, which reimagines what successful learning looks like in a dynamic global world.

Kim Mills: Hello and welcome to Speaking of Psychology, a podcast produced by the American Psychological Association. I'm your host, Kim Mills and I'm speaking to you from APA’s Technology, Mind and Society conference in Washington. This is an interdisciplinary meeting aimed at assessing current efforts to understand and shape the interactions of human beings in technology, for identifying priorities for future work and for promoting the exchange of ideas and collaboration among participants.

Dr. Roberta Golinkoff holds the Unidel H. Rodney Sharp Chair in the school of education at the University of Delaware and is also a member of the departments of psychology and linguistics. She directs the childsplay learning and development lab, whose goal it is to understand how children learn language. She also conducts research on the benefits of play. Dr. Golinkoff has written dozens of journal articles, chapters and academic books and presents at conferences all over the world. She has also written books for a mainstream audience such as “Becoming Brilliant,” which is published by the American Psychological Association and reimagines what successful learning looks like in a dynamic global world. Thank you for joining us today.

Roberta Golinkoff: My pleasure.

Kim Mills: I want to talk about touch screens because they become really ubiquitous and I think every place you turn now people either have a phone in their hands or a tablet and more and more we're seeing people handing these devices to children at very young ages. Is giving a little child a touchscreen a good thing, a bad thing, neutral -- what's your view on this?

Roberta Golinkoff: So, you know we're not going put the genie back in the bottle. So, having a conference that APA just put on is a wonderful thing because it gives people the opportunity to talk about the effects of screens on kids. But I hasten to say even before I answer that when kids were reading a lot in the past, people were worried about their eyes. When television came along people thought civilization was over -- that kids would be glued to screens. So, it seems like every time a new technology comes along, people blow whistles and I'm not sure that the whistles that they're blowing are always justified.

So even my 15, 16-month-old grandchild can't get enough of his father's phone when they call me on face time. There's something so appealing about having buttons you can press, right? In the past it was turning on the light switch, right? Now it's buttons on the phone, right? They’re calling Alaska. We don't even know and I think something like this needs to be harnessed and that's a lot of the papers that I'm hearing here today. How can we use this fabulous drive that kids have to engage with technology to help them learn? And many of the research papers that are out and coming out are showing us that we can instantiate learning principles using technology. We can make it minds-on and not just swiping, but we have to think to get an answer. We can make it engaging and not distracting when we don't break up a story with a sound effect. We can make it socially interactive, which we know is important for how kids learn. So, we can instantiate the learning principles that we know work for kids learning using technology.

Kim Mills: So, I know these devices are still relatively new but how much do we know about the impact of them on child development?

Roberta Golinkoff: So, you know the thing that's so amazing is that the iPad is eight years-old. It came out in 2010.

Kim Mills: Yeah.

Roberta Golinkoff: Imagine how rapidly this has spread. The iPhone itself was 2007. It's crazy. It's everywhere.

Kim Mills: It feels like we've had them forever.

Roberta Golinkoff: Yeah and how could I live without it right? So, in general kids learn about the world through acting on it and through interacting with adults -- caring nurturing adults and of course other kids. So I don't want to short-circuit that and I don't want kids to be on devices 24/7. That said, we have to use the research to guide us. So, for example, with Rebecca Dore, one of my postdocs at the University of Delaware, we've shown that if a parent reads an electronic story from a tablet with a kid, versus if the kid reads the electronic story himself, the kid will get something out of the electronic story if they read it alone, but if they read the story with a parent they get more from it, and that's because the parent can observe where the child is looking and talk about what the kid is interested in. The parent can follow the little pointing finger and the tablet doesn't know anything about the child's life, but the parent can link up the story to the child's life. “Oh that dog, it's just like Nana has,” right? So, no wonder kids learn more from interacting with adults around technology.

Kim Mills: How is that different from just a paper or picture book?

Roberta Golinkoff: Well, that's a really good question. There is no question in the literature it's pervasive, it's everywhere, that children learn a tremendous amount from reading with parents. They learn the grammar of the language. They hear academic language or expressions that they would never hear in typical conversation. For example, I heard a three-year-old go “Poof! And then he disappeared.” Who talks like that? That's from a child's book, right? So, some of those same things can happen in electronic books where the children are exposed to new language, new vocabulary, new sentence structures, just as they are when they cuddle up with parents with a traditional book. What worries me as a researcher is I want parents to spend time with their children and I have this nightmare that someone will hand a tablet. It's probably happening today. “Good night, Johnny. Go read yourself a story.” Oh my god. So, the child doesn't get the benefit of the physical cuddling with the parent, doesn't get the benefit of the parent’s language and explanations and doesn't get the benefit of asking for information. So, we're doing a study in my lab now with Rebecca Dore and my graduate student Daniela Avelar where we're going to look at the affect, the facial expression and some physiological measures, through the use of a bracelet, to look at what happens during storybook-reading, because my hypothesis is it reduces parent stress and makes parents happy although sometimes they fall asleep, I can tell you, and it makes children happy to be able to engage with parents in this very close one-on-one way.

Kim Mills: So, it sounds like what you're saying is don't use these devices as babysitters. This is not just hand the kid the phone so he'll stop crying

Roberta Golinkoff: Well it depends where you are. What I would have given for a phone to hand my kid at a fancy restaurant, right? I mean, realistically, these things can be very useful, and it doesn't mean that you have to use them all the time. You can use them selectively, and it also depends on what's being portrayed either on the telephone or on the tablet. Because this stuff is so new and because we didn't have arguments about how to instantiate the principles of learning on these things, it's now at the right time and people are creating more and more in the way of apps and software that shows kids things that's good for kids that they can learn from. Sesame Street has something called “Martha Speaks.” It's a dog, and it teaches kids vocabulary and they find that kids do in fact learn vocabulary. We have an app we created to teach three-year-olds spatial skills to move things around to assemble puzzles on a screen. I can't tell you that it works yet because we don't have all the data, but I can tell you that kids love this. We do it in the context of a birthday party game and they keep visiting different individuals to prepare in different ways for the birthday party. So, it can be very powerful for children's learning.

Kim Mills: Is there an age that's too early to hand a child a touchscreen, do you think?

Roberta Golinkoff: I think in our society it's happening earlier and earlier, and I can't imagine having prohibitions against it. Now you know, the American Academy of Pediatrics came out a few years ago with a stipulation that no child under two should get near a screen.

Kim Mills: Yes

Roberta Golinkoff: Guess what? They recently admitted they did that on no data. No data. Shame on them. And they have since adjusted that recommendation and weakened it. They also recognize that kids spend a lot of time on Skype and FaceTime with remote grandparents and uncles and aunts, and we know from research that I've done with my long-standing collaborator Kathy Hirsh-Pasek that kids can learn from conversations like Skype and FaceTime. It's different than watching television. Television isn't that responsive. It doesn't respond to the child. But if I call you by name, “Kim, what's this?” and I show you an action with the doll, I can teach you that action just as well over Skype as I can in person.

Kim Mills: So, are there guidelines for parents or some kind of like a Good Housekeeping seal?

Roberta Golinkoff: It's a great point. There is an organization called Common Sense Media, and they really put out interesting information for parents about what are the movies that are good for kids. But they're mostly in the space that's above 0 to 3 and I think they're gonna move down into the 0 to 3 space. Because, as I said, you know, more and more kids being handed a phone to play with while their parent is involved in… My kids only fought when I was on the phone, right, so if I had had something to hand them I would have been pretty happy.

Kim Mills: So, these guidelines and recommendations. Are they based on unscientific evidence? Are they looking at the psychology?

Roberta Golinkoff: I think the Common Sense Media Group has psychologists on their staff, and they do make recommendations based on people's knowledge, and the 0 to 3 space we still have to get there. I'm not aware of people who are making recommendations for that space. Now, in general, I don't want really little kids spending a lot of time on media anyway, but there are some shows that are quite charming and nonviolent. For example, I'm gonna give plugs here. There's Octonauts which my grandchildren in Oakland, California, love and Puff and Rock, which my grandchild in New York loves. I only have seven grandchildren, perfect for a developmental psychologist, and these are charming little shows that the kids really love and they teach about animals, they teach about kindness. You know we don't have Mr. Rogers anymore, but we have things like this. Nothing will replace Mr. Rogers, of course, and Sesame Street is great.

Kim Mills: But things like Teletubbies? Not so much?

Roberta Golinkoff: So, you know, Teletubbies was a little weird because they had characters who spoke in non-standard ways. I don't mean a British accent. I mean, didn't sound like words. Right many times. But you know, the language that children hear around them and hear addressed to them swamps any weirdness that they might hear on a particular television show. And I remember watching episodes of Teletubbies. It was never my first choice because of that, but it did have a nice fantasy element and they get to take kids to see cows and go to farms, and there are so many experiences that children don't necessarily have firsthand that they can only get mediated through media programs.

Kim Mills: So, the fear when I was a child, and I think you mentioned this earlier, when we were not supposed to watch TV because it was going to rot our brains.

Roberta Golinkoff: Right.

Kim Mills: What does the research say now? I mean, what do we know, like, retrospectively? Did television have that kind of an impact on people where perhaps we're not as articulate or bright or motivated as we might have been?

Roberta Golinkoff: Or as critical thinking

Kim Mills: Critical thinking

Roberta Golinkoff: Given our current political situation. It is the case that there's a group called the Kaiser Foundation and they do research on media and how it is consumed and they have reported that children in the middle years of elementary school watch approximately 40 hours of television a week. This sickens me because think of the things that they're not doing. They're not running around outside, granted some children live in neighborhoods that are dangerous. I get that, but there are after-school programs hopefully where they can play outside. They're not interacting as much with peers. So, as you use the word passive before, that's what TV does, and I think for adults as well as for kids who have anxiety it calms them down, but your average kid doesn't have anxiety problems nor does your average adult. So, I don't, I don't see the justification for consuming as much media as children do, and you know in the past kids might open up a book or start coloring or creating a city out of paper. I mean, I love kids being bored you know because then they come up with stuff. I think it's happening less and what that means is it's encouraging less creativity and curiosity, I think, than we've had in the past. And also less executive function, the ability to control your impulses, to switch rapidly and to hold things in working memory. Because I think when you're passive and you're not trying to accomplish, you know, your ordinary daily kinds of play tasks that you do, when you’re a kid. You're not challenging yourself enough. So I don't think it's a wonderful thing for children to be watching as much television. And of course how can I not mention that we have an obesity epidemic? Of course, some of that too is from the advertising and the fact that inexpensive junk food is often what's available. And, for example, low income communities and is frankly cheaper. So, that's part of the problem too. But, yeah, it's a serious problem that we have so many kids with hypertension and type 2 diabetes and if they were running around burning off the calories they were eating rather than sitting passively watching television and eating that'd be good.

Kim Mills: Have you looked at all into what's on the horizon for Smart TVs that could be more interactive?

Roberta Golinkoff: So, I love the Wii. And, just to explain that's the technology where you can actually play physical games like you can bowl, you can bat at baseball and do all kinds of things and play tennis. You can work up a sweat playing with the Wii, which I think is great and I hope that we have more things like that coming down the pike for kids and adults

Kim Mills: Yeah. Great. Well, thank you very much for joining us.

Roberta Golinkoff: My pleasure

Speaking of Psychology is part of the APA podcast network, which includes other great podcasts such as APA Journals Dialogue, about the latest and most exciting psychological research, and Progress Notes, which discusses the practice of psychology. You can find all APA podcasts on iTunes, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also go to our website, www.speakingofpsychology.org, to listen to more episodes and see more resources on the topics we discuss. I'm Kim Mills, with the American Psychological Association, and this is Speaking of Psychology.