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Clifford the Big Red Dog looks fabulous on an
iPad. He sounds good, too — tap the screen and
hear him pant as a blue truck roars into the frame.
“Go, truck, go!” cheers the narrator. But does this
count as story time? Or is it just screen time for
babies? It is a question that parents, pediatricians
and researchers are struggling to answer as
children’s books, just like all the other ones, migrate
to digital media.
For years, child development experts have
advised parents to read to their children early and
often, citing studies showing its linguistic, verbal and
social benefits. In June, the American Academy of
Pediatrics advised doctors to remind parents at
every visit that they should read to their children
from birth, prescribing books as enthusiastically as
vaccines and vegetables.
On the other hand, the academy strongly
recommends no screen time for children under 2,
and less than two hours a day for older children.
At a time when reading increasingly means
swiping pages on a device, and app stores are
bursting with reading programs and learning games
aimed at infants and preschoolers, which bit of
guidance should parents heed?
The answer, researchers say, is not yet
entirely clear. “We know how children learn to read,”
said Kyle Snow, the applied research director at the
National Association for the Education of Young
Children. “But we don’t know how that process will
be affected by digital technology.”
Part of the problem is the newness of the
devices. Tablets and e-readers have not been in
widespread use long enough for the sorts of
extended studies that will reveal their effects on
learning.
Dr. Pamela High, the pediatrician who wrote
the June policy for the pediatrics group, said
electronic books were intentionally not addressed.
“We tried to do a strongly evidence-based policy
statement on the issue of reading starting at a very
young age,” she said. “And there isn’t any data,
really, on e-books.”
But a handful of new studies suggest that
reading to a child from an electronic device
undercuts the dynamic that drives language
development. “There’s a lot of interaction when
you’re reading a book with your child,” Dr. High
said. “You’re turning pages, pointing at pictures,
talking about the story. Those things are lost
somewhat when you’re using an e-book.”
In a 2013 study, researchers found that
children ages 3 to 5 whose parents read to them
from an electronic book had lower reading
comprehension than children whose parents used
traditional books. Part of the reason, they said, was that parents and children using an electronic
device spent more time focusing on the device
itself than on the story (a conclusion shared by at
least two other studies).
“Parents were literally putting their hands
over the kids’ hands and saying, ‘Wait, don’t press
the button yet. Finish this up first,’ ” said Dr. Julia
Parish-Morris, a developmental psychologist at
Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the lead
author of the 2013 study that was conducted at
Temple University. Parents who used conventional
books were more likely to engage in what
education researchers call “dialogic reading,” the
sort of back-and-forth discussion of the story and
its relation to the child’s life that research has
shown are key to a child’s linguistic development.
Complicating matters is that fewer and
fewer children’s e-books can strictly be described
as books, say researchers. As technology evolves,
publishers are adding bells and whistles that
encourage detours. “What we’re really after in
reading to our children is behavior that sparks a
conversation,” said Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a professor
of psychology at Temple and co-author of the 2013
study. “But if that book has things that disrupt the
conversation, like a game plopped right in the
middle of the story, then it’s not offering you the
same advantages as an old-fashioned book.”
Of course, e-book publishers and app
developers point to interactivity as an educational
advantage, not a distraction. Many of those bells
and whistles — Clifford’s bark, the sleepy narration
of “Goodnight Moon,” the appearance of the word
“ham” when a child taps the ham in the Green
Eggs and Ham app — help the child pick up
language, they say.
There is some evidence to bear out those
claims, at least in relation to other technologies. A
study by the University of Wisconsin in 2013 found
that 2-year-olds learned words faster with an
interactive app as opposed to one that required no
action.
But when it comes to learning language,
researchers say, no piece of technology can
substitute for a live instructor — even if the child
appears to be paying close attention.
Patricia K. Kuhl, a director of the Institute
for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University
of Washington, led a study in 2003 that compared
a group of 9-month-old babies who were
addressed in Mandarin by a live instructor with a
group addressed in Mandarin by an instructor on a
DVD. Children in a third group were exposed only
to English.
“The way the kids were staring at the
screen, it seemed obvious they would learn better
from the DVDs,” she said. But brain scans and
language testing revealed that the DVD group
“learned absolutely nothing,” Dr. Kuhl said. “Their
brain measures looked just like the control group
that had just been exposed to English.
The only group that learned was the live
social interaction group.” In other words, “it’s being
talked with, not being talked at,” that teaches
children language, Dr. Hirsh-Pasek said.
Similarly, perhaps the biggest threat posed
by e-books that read themselves to children, or
engage them with games, is that they could lull
parents into abdicating their educational
responsibilities, said Mr. Snow of the National
Association for the Education of Young Children.
“There’s the possibility for e-books to
become the TV babysitters of this generation,” he
said. “We don’t want parents to say, ‘There’s no
reason for me to sit here and turn pages and tell my
child how to read the word, because my iPad can do
it.’ ”
But parents may find it difficult to avoid
resorting to tablets. Even literacy advocates say the
guidelines can be hard to follow, and that allowing
limited screen time is not high on the list of parental
missteps. “You might have an infant and think
you’re down with the A.A.P. guidelines, and you
don’t want your baby in front of a screen, but then
you have a grandparent on Skype,” Mr. Snow said.
“Should you really be tearing yourself apart? Maybe
it’s not the world’s worst thing.”
“The issue is when you’re in the other room
and Skyping with the baby cause he likes it,” he
said. Even if screen time is here to stay as a part of
American childhood, good old-fashioned books seem
unlikely to disappear anytime soon. Parents note
that there is an emotional component to paper-andink storybooks that, so far, does not seem to extend
to their electronic counterparts, however engaging.
From: www.nytimes.com, OCT. 11, 2014
