When my children
were young my wife or I would read to them before bed most
nights. Sometimes, when there was a good movie on TV, we
would pop popcorn and watch as a family on the couch. These
days, I stay in touch with my two sons and daughter with
the help of email.
Our family is pretty typical, I think, in the way the media
have helped us be close over the years. In our house, the
media played a part of family life, but they played second
fiddle to books, outings, and family dinners. For my wife
and me, the point of all those activities was the same:
to enjoy spending time together
Unfortunately, when used improperly, media may do exactly
the opposite. And as a new study published in the Archives
of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine demonstrates, babies
who are exposed to TV and videos have more difficulty forming
mother-child relationships. Even educational programs, according
to the study, can be harmful, because they often replace
parent-child interactions. And those interactions are what
form the foundation of family closeness. The authors of
the study suggest video "exposure should be limited
to educational programming that is co-viewed by the mother
because this is most frequently associated with interactions."
We are born to be social. And language development is a
social process. Consider this fact: one of the strongest
predictors of reading ability in school is the amount of
one-to-one verbal interaction between caregiver and child
in the first three years of life. In other words, babies
learn to talk to people by, well, talking to people. Letting
the TV screen talk to them instead doesn't seem to have
the same effect.
Using media as a babysitter for babies and toddlers is tempting
but it's a bad idea because kids need real life social experiences.
Dinner conversations, bedtime stories, and walks around
the block provide the kind of interaction that a video screen
never can. As the authors of the study point out, even educational
programming is not beneficial unless parents and children
watch the program together.
One of the most alarming findings from the new study concerned
socioeconomic status (SES). Simply put, lower income families
tend to use TV as a baby sitter more often. That finding
may help explain why the size of kids' vocabularies varies
so greatly. According to a now famous 2003 study by Betty
Hart and Todd R. Risley entitled "The Early Catastrophe:
The 30 Million Word Gap by Age 3," kids in poverty
hear 18 million words by 36 months, while their counterparts
from higher income families have heard 50 million.
If we're really serious about No Child Left Behind this
is the kind of information we need to get to parents and
child care providers: we don't start to raise readers when
they go to school. We start to raise readers as soon as
a baby is born. But the recipe for success does not require
an advanced degree. The recipe for success is talk, talk,
talk and read, read, read. Media can be a healthy part of
family life, but only when it helps us talk together.
David Walsh, Ph.D. is the founder of the
MediaWise Movement, a program of the National Institute
on Media and the Family (www.mediawise.org).
His latest book, No: Why Kids - of All Ages - Need to
Hear It and Ways Parents Can Say It (Free Press) is
available in bookstores.
