No Apps or Upgrades Needed
Look, the brain of the child is shaped by the interactions they have with parents—that’s just absolutely clear. We need to be in the physical and relational world before we reduce it down to screens.
—DAN SIEGEL, CHILD PSYCHIATRIST AND AUTHOR
IN THE SECONDS after Kaitlin was born, the nurse held her, cleaning her up, and Betsy looked at her husband and said something. Twenty years later she can’t remember what she said to her husband but her newborn daughter’s response is still vivid: “Kaitlin turned her head—she clearly recognized my voice,” Betsy says. “I was so surprised—silly, I guess, as she had been hearing me talk for months. But it was just a moment of recognition—that she knew me. It was the moment I realized that she was as bonded to me as I was to her.”
In my travels and talks with school groups, I often begin by asking parents to recall that earliest touchstone memory of falling in love with their baby. Angela, thirty years old when her first daughter was born, says she had been through so many miscarriages that when little Linda arrived, the first feeling was profound relief. That night with her baby in the bedside bassinet, Angela listened to Linda sleep and her heart filled with gratitude: “She was here, and she was alive, and she was mine.” A few years later, when second daughter Lori came along, “I would hold her against my chest and she would put her tiny hand out and rest it on my chest right under my collar bone, and just leave it there,” Angela says. “I was her anchor, and I felt it.”
Many mothers and fathers point out that their love affair with their baby began in utero. Others, including adoptive parents, have told me their stories of love at first sight or snuggle. Some parents describe a worried wait through a rough start with medical complications or fussy feeding or colicky wailing or overwhelming exhaustion that made them think they might never bond with their child.
Blair was ill with a 104-degree fever when she delivered Claudia, who had to be in a boxy incubator on IV antibiotics for the first week. Breastfeeding was complicated and clumsy, and for the first two days both seemed mostly exhausted and distracted. On the third day, in a moment when her baby’s vulnerability overwhelmed her, “I started sobbing,” Blair says, sobbing anew as she recalled the moment more than five years later. “I was overwhelmed with the instinct to protect and heal. I can’t put into words how much the love came down over me all at once . . . the love fell over me like a blanket.”
Jared, an older first-time dad at fifty-five, took the week off when his son Brandon was born, and he vividly remembers his intense focus on caring for his new son and his wife, Anne, who had endured a difficult delivery and challenging start to breastfeeding. “I sat in a chair and read Harry Potter to them, hour after hour,” Jared says. “I have a lump in my throat thinking about it now [eight years later] because of the overwhelming sense of being totally in that moment. It was definitely what Maslow referred to as a ‘peak experience,’” he says, referring to the psychologist Abraham Maslow’s term for a transcendent moment of life-affirming awe. “I recall changing Brandon’s diaper for the first time and marveling how there was only joy in the act, no nausea . . . not what I expected.”
TAKE A MOMENT and remember that first feeling. Perhaps it was humming to your baby in utero, gazing into his eyes for the first time, or just watching her fall asleep on your chest, hearing her breathy baby sighs or feeling the damp spot where her drooly little cheek was pressed against your shirt. Maybe it was in a frightening moment, a “dark, murky” moment, as one father put it, when the fragility of your child’s life was nearly unbearable, and into that abyss came a powerful experience of a bond beyond words. Perhaps none of it felt natural to you at all, but a friend, neighbor, or caregiver proved the perfect mentor for you, or you picked up what you and your baby needed from watching other parents you admired. Close your eyes and connect with that feeling and you have the best possible reason to follow the consensus of expert medical, scientific, psychological, and other child development opinion to leave tech out of your baby’s life for the first twenty-four months. Fresh to life, open to your imprint, your infant watches and listens for your face, your voice, your touch, your gaze. Tech offers nothing your baby needs more than you.
Tech and Me and Baby Makes Three
Babies come equipped with their own bonding instinct, and we know from studies of infants who thrive and those who don’t how vital the bond between parent and child is for their healthy growth and development. From the moment your baby is born, you define her world not only in the ordinary sense of organizing her external environment, but also from the inside out. There is a natural, wonderful sequence in the way grown-ups have tended and played with infants forever, and it is those simple interactions—nursing, soothing, bathing, diapering, singing, strolling, reading, and playing—that provide all a baby needs to lay the foundation for the next levels of cognitive development at three, four, and five years old, and for all their future learning.
The mirroring exchange that occurs when we return our baby’s gaze or giggle or respond to his cues about hunger or comfort or curiosity allows us to communicate wordlessly to one another aspects of emotion and presence—neurological “statistics” as one researcher put it—that continue to develop, deepening with every interaction. If that connection is stable, steady, secure, and supportive, baby and parent form what we call a “secure attachment.” When those qualities are weak or missing, the attachment may be compromised. When this emotional connection is strong, the young brain is open to new experiences: the sweet smell of milk, the sight of a spinning mobile, reaching for a stuffed animal. The social brain needs the same emotional foundation to develop relationships, which begin with parents and caregivers and broaden to extended family, sitters, and neighbors.
The first and continuing lesson your infant learns from you is that she exists—Oh someone recognizes me, I am a being in the universe, there is something worthy about me—someone is noticing and paying attention to me! This is what forms her sense of being a person and makes her feel safe and secure in her environment, in her primary attachment to her parents, and in the widening circle of trusted others as she grows. The baby brain comes hardwired for human relationship because that is the most essential connection for survival and all future learning. And the single most important relationship is the one your baby finds with you.
Consider what happens when you add a cell phone to that picture and your baby’s view of you includes a handheld or headset device, or a tablet or computer screen that routinely pulls you away, interrupts your attention, or captures it completely. Perhaps your frequent e-mail or Facebook activity becomes an integral part of your baby’s experience of you. What does it mean when you use screens and apps as a pacifier for your baby or toddler, or as a babysitter or teacher, or in a pinch as a stand-in for you? Or when you use them to distract yourself or pacify yourself to relieve the stress and tedium of your parenting time. Tech not only changes the iconic picture of the parent-child relationship in early childhood—it changes the relationship itself.
Ellen worries about that when she sees her six-month-old son Henry’s expression as he watches her work on her iPad during playtime on the floor or sometimes when she’s holding him. Like most of us, she is often preoccupied with all the things she has to do, and if Henry is engrossed in his own little world of play, she will discreetly pull her tablet out, hoping he will not notice.
He’s just lying here and playing, so I’m on the iPad and suddenly he stops playing and he is looking at me! I mean so many times—that happens 90 percent of the time—and I don’t know at what point he stopped playing and started looking at me. It breaks my heart because I don’t know how long he has been staring at me. I mean, what is he thinking? I feel so guilty that I’m not present with him and he knows it. It’s one thing if I’m unloading the dishwasher and talking to him. That doesn’t require brainpower, but e-mail does. It’s impossible to really be doing both. I know he knows I am completely disengaged, you can just see it in his eyes. So what does that mean to him [that] we are both in the same room together and I’m not being present with him?
There is really no way to know what it means to Henry; at six months old he can’t tell us. However, based on long-standing research of infants’ reactions to their mother’s voice and facial expressions, we know that Henry is indeed capable of detecting that his mother is disengaged. We also know that babies are often distressed when they look to their parent for a reassuring connection and discover the parent is distracted or uninterested. Studies show that they are especially distressed by a mother’s “flat” or emotionless expression, something we might once have associated with a depressive caregiver but which now is eerily similar to the expressionless face we adopt when we stare down to text, stare away as we talk on our phones, or stare into a screen as we go online. More recent studies using brain imaging scans on infants show that brain centers critical for higher order learning and language development “light up” when a mother is present and fully engaged as she speaks to her baby. When the mother’s proximity changes, the brain’s response changes, too.
We also know that our child’s fascination with the gadgets we use is a response to the cues we give; the more attention we give an object, the more they want it, notes the Yale psychiatrist Bruce Wexler, author of Brain and Culture: Neurobiology, Ideology, and Social Change. Wexler, who also directs a neurocognitive research laboratory, says that research from child development to anthropological fields shows that children have always been quick to adopt whatever we put within reach.
“If an infant is given a choice of playing with an object being handled by an adult or with an identical copy of the object that is closer, the infant will reach past the copy to play with the one the adult has,” he explains. “By six months of age more than half the infants will follow their mother’s gaze, and by the time they are a year old nearly all will do so.”
Whether the behavior is inborn or conditioned, or a little of both, Wexler says, the result is that through this “instrumental parenting”—the human habit of collecting and introducing our children to material things—we influence what our infants pay attention to, what they become “most aware of, become most familiar with, and think most about.” A parent’s focus of attention—whether it is cookies or computer screens or books—becomes the infant’s object of desire.
So we can assume that Henry’s watchful gaze reflects that natural curiosity. Whatever Henry is thinking when he watches his mother sneak some screen time, he is thinking it often—90 percent of the time they are together this way, Ellen says. Whatever he is thinking, it has power in his young mind; it repeatedly interrupts his attention to his own toys and self-directed play, riveting his attention on his mother and her screen. Perhaps he is simply curious, enamored with his mother’s visually enticing screen or perhaps with the sight of her so entranced by it. Perhaps he has designs on the screen for himself. Or, as Ellen worries, perhaps he is drawing meaning from it, aware how completely disengaged and “not present with him” she is and feeling unsettled by that.
Although she cannot know what Henry is thinking, Ellen’s sensitivity to the emotional connection and disconnection she has with her son is a good example of what Dan Siegel calls “mindsight.” In his book by that name, Siegel says parents can cultivate their ability to “see” the minds of their children through the basic signals they can perceive. For parent and baby alike, the nonverbal messages of eye contact, facial expression, tone of voice, body posture, and the timing and intensity of response may reveal our internal processes more directly than our words. For a parent, this means paying attention to your state of mind as well as your child’s, so you can recognize the emotions in play without being swept up in them.
Ellen understands that she is the emotional foundation for Henry (as is her partner, Amy) and that Henry’s well-being is influenced by her ability to, for meaningful periods of time, be fully present and emotionally available to him. She is tuned in to the two-way communication between them, aware of her own thoughts (I’m just checking e-mail . . . I’m ignoring Henry but I’m anxious to read e-mail) as well as what Henry’s experience of the moment might be (I’m a little anxious. Sometimes she cares about me, sometimes she doesn’t). Staring into the screen to read feels different—more intense and oblivious to Henry—than when she’s folding laundry and chatting with Henry at her feet. And it is: no matter how brief, screen activity locks our attention, visual and otherwise, in a way that excludes everyone and everything around us. Even when we multitask, the second we engage in a screen the accompanying disconnect from those around us is palpable. You know the feeling—you’ve been the one left waiting when someone says, “one sec—I just need to check this.”
Ellen knows she should be attentive when they are together and respond to his coos and other nonverbal cues, encouraging his attempts to communicate with her. She knows that at six months old, he needs to feel her connection, not the repeated experiences of disconnect in routinely having to wait for her to look up from her screen.
By the time children are three or four years old, they can play and communicate more independently, but from birth to two they rely on us completely and they need our engaged presence during these connecting interactions. They can tell when we are distracted. We can’t fool them, yet, even knowing that, it can be tough to wean ourselves from established tech habits.
Many parents who come to see me are struggling with difficult adjustments to the demands of new parenthood or a growing family and, for all the ways tech is helpful to them, it is also problematic. Today, in addition to issues of potty training, picky eaters, sibling rivalry, and chronic waking up, our conversations inevitably turn to the presence and role of tech in a young family’s life.
Donna Wick, a clinical and developmental psychologist and director of Mind to Mind Parenting, helps new parents develop what she calls “reflective parenting,” a quality akin to mindsight. Very little in life prepares parents for the dramatic shift from a me-centered life, or even a couple’s we-centered life, to the baby-centered life, she says. “A crucial part of parenting in that first year or two is that you realize that if you are going to be a responsible and responsive parent, then it’s all about the baby—you are going to come second, and that’s a hard lesson,” Wick says. “Tech aids and abets the impulse we have to avoid that level of responsibility and that level of self-sacrifice. But you just can’t.”
This includes computer time for work and personal enjoyment. It also includes parents’ TV, phone, and texting habits and their children’s casual or “secondhand” exposure to all that. Then there is the matter of time their infant or toddler may be spending on screens. That often already includes TV, cell phones, tablets, and toys with electronic play features. It is rare anymore that screens are completely absent from the family scene. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 74 percent of children under age two watch TV, 59 percent watch TV for an average of just over two hours daily, and 30 percent of children birth-to-three years old have TVs in their bedrooms. A 2011 survey by Parenting magazine and BlogHer Publishing Network found that one-third of Gen Y mothers (born between the mid-seventies and mid-nineties) allow their two-year-olds to use a smartphone, presumably to watch videos and play games. Another study sponsored by the Sesame Street Workshop concluded that more than 60 percent of children under age three watch videos online. The younger the parent, the earlier kids are plugging in.
More significant is how often we find that screen time and other tech habits are contributing to tension and anxiety for the parents and disruptions in sleep patterns that can lead to irritability and other symptoms of overstimulation in their children. People think it’s harmless to watch TV or be on the computer while their child plays nearby with her blocks. It’s not. Children are seeing and hearing secondhand what their parents are plugged into. Parents tell me they feel both guilty and defensive about their tech use.
I can’t be unavailable to my coworkers.
When am I supposed to have “me” time?
How can I keep up with all the check-ups and other scheduling for everyone?
My eighteen-month-old starts to whine as soon as I pick up my phone.
The only way I can use my iPad now is in a separate room because my toddler wants it so badly.
Is it ever okay to talk or go online with my baby in my arms?
These questions about tech and the way it can connect and disconnect us as families, how it can foster and hinder child development, used to come up as children reached preschool age and began to engage in the wider circles of school and community. Now the concerns come home with the newborn. This is especially troubling because as informative as tech is for adults, everything an infant needs to thrive happens off-line, off screens. Everything that a baby needs from its environment between birth and two years comes from people, from relationships with people and interactions with the environment—physically exploring, playing, crawling, and interacting with others. When we triangulate our relationship with our babies and tech, we compromise that essential connection.
Nature, Nurture, and Multitasking
You don’t have to look far to see the way screens, cell phones, digital tablets, and other electronic devices have become the ever-present third party in our conversations and downtime with our very young children. How often have we looked askance at the sight of a parent pushing a baby in a stroller while talking intently into his or her cell phone, only to be that person the next day? Who hasn’t made a promise to themselves—today when I go to the park with my baby I’m going to turn my cell phone off and give her my undivided attention—only to stay plugged in and let that promise slide just one more time?
Immersed as we may be in a tender, relational “right-brain” moment with our baby, our left-brain taskmaster, our neurological “wizard of connection,” as Dan Siegel calls it, drives us to seek completion, mastery, order, predictability. “They’re all left-brain dreams,” he says, “that’s what the left brain lives for.” So just as mother’s milk is soothing for an infant in the middle of the night, for the frazzled, sleep-deprived parent the allure of checking e-mail provides a satisfying fix, even if it takes place while nursing an infant at 2 a.m.
We all know how hard it is to resist that impulse, especially when our baby appears completely absorbed. It seems harmless enough to hold the baby on your lap as you sit at the computer to catch up on e-mail or Facebook. Or when you bring the laptop into the kitchen at mealtime, letting the baby play with her toy screen while you’re on yours. It feels odd not to slip your phone in your pocket or your iPad in your pack as you pick your baby up to go into another room or out the door. Our right-brain relational self says pick up the baby; our left-brain multitasker says let’s do a two-fer—grab your phone. But our babies need to bond with us, not our gadgets.
This early triangulation is a relational game changer for our babies, but also for us. Parenthood is a reciprocal process in which our babies and the act of parenting make us who we are. In the hyperconnected digital culture it is easy to forget that the parent-child bond is just that: a bond between two people. Just as we are shaping our baby’s understanding of what it means to be a person, our babies are teaching us what it means to be a parent. They need for us to be attentive partners if we are to learn their rhythms, their temperament and personality, their moods and body language, their stimulation needs and limits.
Babies and toddlers are dependent on us in so many ways, we sometimes overlook the brilliant teachers they are and the enormous task they set out from birth to do: develop our skills to be the loving, effective parents they need to prepare them to be able learners in the wider world. From the moment they are born, long before they become verbal, they are teaching us how to be parents, grooming our intuitive sense, teaching us to understand their needs, wants, and ways of being. The cranky fussing, the wide-eyed gaze, the sudden smile: in their preverbal language, they show us what counts, cheer us on when we get it right, and let us know when to try again.
These are skills we will need—and want—for the rest of our lives as parents. Years from now the quality of your relationship with your child won’t be measured by the high-tech toys or apps you gave them when they were babies, but by the quality of connection you created together in those early years. It is precisely that loving human connection we call bonding, attachment, and attunement that stimulates optimal brain development.
Your interactions with your baby are the classroom of early childhood. Language, reading, play, movement, all of it begins with you and the quality of the connection you establish and continue to nourish from birth through the early years. Tech cannot do it, but tech can come between the two of you, and it can undo some of the critical brain building under way.
The Sensorium: The Baby Brain’s Bandwidth for Development
When your baby locks her gaze on you or on a spot on the wall, when she smiles at you or grabs your finger for the first time, when she startles at a sound or pumps her little legs, or when she squeals with delight in a game of peek-a-boo, you are witness to the miracle of development. These are all visible expressions of the earliest sequences in developing neural pathways and networks of what we call the sensorium—the collective capacities of the brain to receive, process, and interpret sensory information. The sensorium sounds like some fantastical play palace in the neighborhood where you might take your baby for an afternoon of fun. In a way, it is. Everything your baby sees, hears, tastes, and touches, every move or sound she makes, every sensation and emotion she experiences—and all of your interactions with her—contributes to the robust development of the sensorium.
Tremendous brain growth occurs in the first two years of life—more dramatic than at any other age—such that the overall brain size doubles in the first year, reaching about 70 percent of its adult size; it reaches 85 percent of adult size by age two. During this time your baby’s brain is busily building structural and functional connectivity, creating the essential neuro-architecture to support life and learning. Too much tech at any age, but especially too early an introduction to it—before age two—shortchanges a young child on the time and mix of experiences the sensorium needs for well-rounded development. Neurologically and psychologically, the tech effect becomes a wild card in your baby’s development.
“The brain was designed to develop in all the areas through natural human interactions and play, and by putting kids in front of screens we are changing their brains,” says the developmental psychologist JoAnn Deak. In her “baby brain boot camp” talks for parents, Deak is unequivocal about the value of a tech-free infancy and toddlerhood: “The job of early childhood and family life is to make sure that every sector of the sensorium has a chance to fully develop, that every sector gets strong enough to do the job. If every sector doesn’t get to develop to its fullest potential, then the deficit is lasting.” If you let the brain do just the things it likes—for instance, repetitive play on a touch screen—then that imbalance, too, can hinder the brain for a lifetime. “It’s what screens take away and destroy,” Deak says. “For every hour they play a computer game or watch a program that someone else has made for them, they lose the opportunity to do that for themselves.”
Language development and the neurological foundations for later reading are especially prominent threads in the “embroidered circuitry” of the sensorium at this age.
Unlike speech and language development, for which the brain comes equipped with neural circuitry from day one, there are no ready circuitries in the brain for reading. Those neural pathways and networks take years to develop, years of layered learning to create a circuit that moves from being “a decoding machine”—a term Maryanne Wolf uses to explain what children are doing in the early stages of reading—to being a circuit wired for comprehension, what she calls “a place where the deepest thought can happen and be brought forward to insight and epiphany.” The time you spend talking and reading with your child acts on many levels to strengthen those neural pathways. Tech can interrupt or weaken that connection.
Contrary to what commercial educational or developmental learning programs would have you believe, when we talk about whether media content, toys, or gadgets are developmentally appropriate, we are not talking about whether an infant or toddler can manipulate a device or sit still for a show. We are talking about what it does to them when they do. Just because your baby can tap a touch screen to change a picture does not mean that he should, that it is a developmentally useful or appropriate activity for him. In fact, research suggests that the process of tapping a screen or keypad and engaging with the screen activity may itself be rerouting brain development in ways that eliminate development of essential other neural connections your child needs to develop reading, writing, and higher-level thinking later.
Research by Patricia Kuhl and others shows that babies learn language most effectively from human interaction, not from audio or video programs or entertaining apps or TV shows, as advertisers (and sometimes our own wishful thinking) would suggest. The mediated connection does other things; it visually stimulates, which the studies show does not support language development and may negatively affect it and negatively affect attention span. Studies also show that the mediated connection fails to stimulate certain other neurological connections needed for language and cognitive development. And it appears that certain learning centers of the infant brain respond only when interacting with real people—physically present and attentive—and particularly when they are parents or caregivers with whom the baby has formed an attachment.
Specifically, it appears that babies need what we call an embodied connection to stimulate the part of the brain that governs language development. Ordinarily, these neural connections are made naturally in the face-to-face interaction between parent and child. Putting a baby in front of videotape or on an iPad does not teach language, and when a mediated connection replaces a human connection the benefits of the human connection are, neurologically speaking, lost or diminished.
Neurobiologist Wolf says that although the science is complex, her advice to parents is simple, summed up in what she calls “the grandmother principle,” which is: “If you want a child to talk, you talk to them.” And you read to them, too. When you do, your child experiences the structures, cadence, and eventually the content of language and reading in the context of relationship, imaginative storytelling, and playful interaction. “The little baby just loves the whole setup that reading gives,” Wolf says. “You’re listening to a sonorous, beloved one’s voice reading, and they love to hear the sound of your voice. I can’t tell you all that goes into that, but I can tell you it exists, it’s powerful, and to neglect it is an absurd waste.”
Wolf notes that studies show that in comparisons of children under two whose parents used an array of video and other auxiliary language learning aids and those who learned without the aids, language development was superior in the ones who learned without. “There is nothing better for the development of language than human language . . . people talking to them,” she says.
The language development expert Lydia Soifer speaks of the intrinsic motivation that is lost, as well as the primary connection between language and human communication. It is in the textured dynamic or “charge” of interpersonal relationship that children learn language best.
“Online language programs are just tools, they are not dynamic enough,” Soifer explains. “In fact, the foundations of literacy are in sounds, whether or not it’s the speech sounds or the intonation patterns, or the pause and stress and juncture patterns. It’s how we change meaning. Where there isn’t a human dynamic, it isolates out the sounds from the language, from the intent, from the content. Yes, you need those skills to learn to read, but you want to do it with a certain level of motivation, and feedback that is affectively rich, not with bells and whistles that give you a reward. And I think part of what happens is that kids get addicted to the bells and whistles.”
These early clues to the impact of tech on children’s brains suggest changes in neurological processes that appear to alter children’s intellectual, social, and emotional development. Some of those tech effects on the brain may be helpful for some children. We know, for example, that some children, typically a little older, who are medically diagnosed with nonverbal learning disabilities or other neurological deficits or differences may benefit from particular screen-based activities. However, for all other children, screen time may contribute to uneven brain development, as screen-based activities have been shown to stimulate visual processing more heavily than other parts of the sensorium. At the same time, by pulling their attention into screen-based play, tech distracts them from the most essential learning environment of all, the parent-child relationship and real-life experience in the family and the wider world. It also exposes them to potentially damaging content.
Extensive research since the 1970s has established that media violence contributes to anxiety, desensitization, and increased aggression; that among young children, violent media can trigger fear responses that are long lasting, that are linked to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms, and that can occur after one exposure. Viewing frightening television, even programming deemed appropriate for preschoolers, raised children’s heart rates and caused symptoms of PTSD. Sleep difficulties were one of the most common symptoms, and a recent study found that children who lose as little as half an hour of needed sleep per night can show behaviors typical of attention deficit and hyperactive disorder (ADHD). We don’t yet know all the mechanisms for these links, but the outcomes are certainly cause for concern.
None of us wants to make our children anxious or aggressive or inattentive; we don’t wish for them to be sleep deprived. But the power of the screen lures us into unintentionally exposing our infants to harm within the walls of our own homes.
All the research underscores our need for caution in how we introduce children to tech, especially in the first two years of life. Research as well as personal experience tell us that when grown-ups watch TV or any screen in the presence of children, they don’t interact directly with the child with the same focus, pace, attention, or the visceral, immediate connection that stimulates a baby’s healthy neurological and social development.
Experts have said most of this for decades, yet still parents somehow hold on to the belief that TV “mostly helps” rather than “mostly hurts” their children’s learning. Perhaps an explanation lies in the conclusion of researchers who examined how many new words twelve-to-eighteen-month-old children learned from viewing a popular DVD several times a week for one month. The study found that the children viewing the DVD did not learn more words than the no-DVD control group. Further, the highest level of learning occurred in a no-DVD setting in which parents set out to teach their children the same target words during everyday activities. But the clincher was what the researchers discovered about the parents: those who liked the DVD tended to overestimate how much their children learned from it. The authors concluded that infants learn relatively little from the infant media, and parents sometimes overestimate what they do learn.
Bait and Switch: Things Are Not What They Seem
From the 1960s when TVs dominated American homes and before computers and cell phones became commonplace, experts warned about the dangers of too much screen time and how important it was to unplug kids and families. Even so, parents of that era came to depend on TV as a babysitter for dependable entertainment and the promise of educational benefits. The cautionary voices were duly noted and largely ignored. But at least a TV set didn’t follow you out the door. When you went to the grocery store or the park or got stuck in traffic with your baby, you had to wing it. You sang and you played rhyming games. Your baby got lulled to sleep by the motion of the car or the stroller or your body as you rocked her or walked along. Who would have imagined that someday the teddy bear in the baby’s crib would have a touch screen, digitalized voice, and apps that offered everything from virtual peek-a-boo games to bedtime lullabies? Or that tech for kids and adults would be so pervasive that we’d spend more time on screens or online than we would in the presence of each other?
The ease with which our screens travel with us today, and the ease with which we can hand them off to our babies anywhere anytime, adds a new urgency to the conversation. A father in the grocery store quiets his fussy toddler by handing her his iPhone with Angry Birds flashing across the screen. A mom asks me if it is all right that she straps her twenty-month-old son in his car seat and pops “his favorite” Power Rangers DVD on her iPad for him to watch while she catches up on work calls as they drive to day care. Another mom gives her two-year-old daughter a touch-screen storybook app to “get her interested in reading.” All of them assume that tech is helping their child cope or play or learn in that moment.
We may think that their eagerness to engage with it or their quiet, focused attention means they are learning to calm themselves, learning to focus, learning to read, learning to draw, learning to do all the things on their developmental to-do list. But that is not what is happening. One reason TV and tech are especially risky from birth to two is that the stimulus-response mode—instant gratification—is so engaging that we may easily mistake our child’s keen interest in it for “learning.” Psychologically and educationally, a very different kind of learning is under way.
Core Lessons Come from Human Tone and Touch
When we hand our baby a touch screen to keep her occupied or entertained, she’s missing the opportunity to engage herself—literally, to engage with her own inner self, her feelings, and processes for learning and adapting in the moment. A core aspect of infancy and childhood is the range of learning that comes from human touch and vocal interaction, from the rhythm and pacing of communication. It’s as basic as the newborn learning the boundaries of physical self—the difference between his skin and his mom’s or dad’s. You exist. I am here for you. Forevermore the comfort of “the other” is a source of security, safety, and protection. When your child falls and runs into your arms, so many things happen in the physicality of that embrace. The voice, the word, the physical experience, the face, the gaze, the coo. The surround sound of human comfort and optimism. You’re having this feeling. And this is how you can manage that. You’re going to be okay. This is the beginning of how we teach our children to self-regulate—read their own emotional states and build their capacity for self-soothing and the foundation of emotional stability, optimism, and resilience.
We continue to teach our babies by calibrating our responses to fit the need. At first you pick them up all the time, then you differentiate between their signals; you encourage them to calm themselves. Guided by your growing intuitive sense about your baby, you discern when it’s appropriate to wait a little longer to respond, teaching your child to trust that the response will come and to practice self-soothing in that pause. When your thirteen- or fourteen-month-old toddler tumbles, you don’t look with your hurt look or your panicked look, you look with your calm and reassuring look and this helps your toddler learn that falling down happens and is no reason to panic. That we can feel angry, too, and work through that feeling rather than be defined by it. There’s a big difference between I feel angry and I am angry as a definition of who we are. We are constantly giving them cues—verbally, expressively, emotionally in our tone, teaching them how to handle frustration, pain, and accidents, and how to self-regulate. These skills do more than curb temper tantrums. They are developmental stepping-stones that eventually will enable a child to control his bladder, use the toilet, tie his shoes, zip a jacket, learn to share. At each developmental stage the capacity to soothe yourself and calm yourself down, to deal with impulsivity, tolerate frustration, work through boredom to creativity, to make transitions from sleep to awake to play to eating develops through practice. It is in those human-to-human interactions day after day after day that our children learn these fundamental lessons that prepare them for all future learning.
Tech Goes Faster Than the Speed of Life
Tech creates an expectation of instant gratification. An app or screen game’s instant response or a stimulating, fast-paced TV show delivers a happy hit to the baby brain that makes ordinary life sluggish by comparison. A popular YouTube clip shows a baby accustomed to playing with an iPad struggling to make a print magazine “work.” The baby taps and swipes and thumps on the pages clearly attempting to make the pictures change. It doesn’t work, of course, and the baby grows frustrated when nothing happens. When we train a baby or toddler to expect this kind of interaction and this tempo, we create an expectation that if something doesn’t ping, whistle, light up, and move quickly on demand then it isn’t fun or interesting or it’s not working. Hands-on blocks, books, and puzzles lose their appeal. Coloring with a crayon takes a lot more effort and coordination than “touch and drag” coloring and it lacks the screen zing of responsiveness that makes interactive tech so fun.
Lost is the slow-paced hands-on practice that develops small motor skills, dexterity, and eye-hand coordination. The sensory experience that goes with that—the touch and smell and messy fun of play—is gone, too. When we give infants apps and entertaining games they are distracted but they aren’t learning what we might think or hope, and when we routinely hand them a device—or a TV show—to occupy them, they don’t learn how to entertain themselves. In those moments they miss the opportunity to think creatively, problem solve, or accomplish the important slower-paced baby tasks they need to: stacking, shaping, sorting, tearing, pushing, pulling, pouring, scooping. Your shared delight in their discovery is the best bells and whistles for their development.
Babies Need to Shake, Rattle, and Roll IRL
Tech is stimulating but sedentary. Children need to move to be happy. They learn and grow from being physically active. It builds muscle mass and has a positive effect on their appetite, their ability to sleep, their self-confidence, and their sense of competence in the world. Infants love physical activity: bouncing in your lap, scooching in their crib or across the floor, pulling themselves up, and reaching for and grabbing everything in sight. They like to shake, rattle, and roll. They like to flip and taste the floppy pages of soft books. They love to walk, crawl, or climb.
Even before they can walk, they push the limits of their physical development: they try, they succeed, they fail; you encourage and applaud and console; and they do it again and again. They learn about trying. In that process they not only develop their physical selves, they internalize your encouragement and your confidence in their ability to fall and get back up. These are the roots of the resiliency, grit, and optimism they need for life. The more we can share that with them and delight in each day’s new adventure, the more our children will feel like explorers equipped to reach new heights in other aspects of their development.
On Screens Your Baby Is “in the Zone,” but with Whom?
An infant may stare mesmerized at goofy cartoons or so-called educational programming, but not all children’s programming is fit for children, especially infants and toddlers. When we put them in front of the TV and their focus shifts into “the zone,” it absolutely buys us time for a needed shower or uninterrupted work time. But we don’t yet fully understand what the mesmerizing screen or tech zone means to the baby brain, and its relationship to future psychological health or unhealthy predispositions toward addiction, drugs, and the need for such stimulus later in life. We know that children who watch TV want to watch more TV, and that kids on screen games often have difficulty ending their play willingly.
The American Academy of Pediatrics, which has been firm with its recommendation of no screen time for infants under two, has come under fire for setting an unrealistic standard in this tech-driven era. The recommendation stands, meaning that if you’re going to busy your baby with screen time or have your baby with you when you watch or use screens, be extremely picky about what they see and extremely watchful of the time they spend that way.
Choose shows that teach them about the world around them in a way that is kind, hopeful, and encouraging; not bratty, sarcastic, fast, or frightening. Make certain that content is not overstimulating (check the research-based media lists) and be sure the tone is always empathically tuned in to the developmental level of an infant or toddler. For the under-two crowd, look at the age two and up best bets like Mr. Rogers, Sesame Street, and Blue’s Clues that share those qualities and remain favorites on the resource lists of safe media for toddlers. Pick any media exposure as carefully as you would pick a babysitter to leave alone with your baby. Remember, from your baby’s natural point of view, Fisher-Price and Disney have nothing on you when it comes to dazzling educational toys and games. You are the gold standard.
Real Babies Need Real Read-Aloud Time
You wouldn’t dream of substituting a touch-screen meal for real food, and no matter how sophisticated voice tech becomes, audio or digital books and reading games are no substitute for personally reading to your baby. Earlier in this chapter we looked at reading to your baby in the context of language development and establishing the neurological foundations for later reading—the nuts and bolts of brain development. Sharing a book together, reading aloud to your child brings you physically close in the happiest way. It also inspires conversation—even with children who aren’t yet conversational in the strict sense. The timeless attraction of The Runaway Bunny is not just the story about love everlasting but the interaction it inspires between you and your baby. You read, you play, you listen and respond—you communicate. Where, oh, where is that little bunny? Are you my runaway bunny? Your baby points, grins, giggles, relishes your voice, your touch, your attention.
What about sharing story time on a Kindle or other e-reader or digital tablet? Does it really matter whether snuggle time and reading to your young child involves a screen or a printed page? Science simply doesn’t have the answer to that question yet, so as parents we are left to reason for ourselves based on what we do know. On the plus side, any face-to-face snuggle time and read aloud time with your child is better than none. This includes the positive experience of being at the center of your attention, talking about a story, and interacting over it. For our infants and toddlers, though, other considerations include the unique window of opportunity for critical aspects of development that depend on the baby’s physical interaction with the environment and the material world. For instance, an e-book eliminates the more textured tactile experience of a conventional book. Interaction with a three-dimensional book means that an infant sees and grasps different-size books and views different-size pages; feels the texture of paper and book covers and the weight and heft of a book; focuses the eyes on type and illustrations on a printed page rather than a lighted screen, developing eye-hand coordination by first watching you turn a page and eventually learning to do that herself. Research also suggests that the direct screen-viewing experience may narrow the neurological range of the young child’s developing brain. That negative effect may show up differently for the older child. For the school-age child, we might want to consider how much time they spend on screens routinely, how easy it is to become trained for screen-reading, making physical books a more challenging medium for them to use for research or pleasure reading—a disincentive to engage the body of literature and information available only that way. These are just a few reasons you might choose to use three-dimensional books for that shared reading time, or at least consciously include traditional books in your child’s everyday story time experience.
If parents absent themselves and outsource reading to tech—using audio books or other read-aloud devices—children lose opportunities to develop the focus, endurance, and the deeper sensibilities they need to move into more profound learning, says Maryanne Wolf. “We will have a generation of readers highly adept at handling multiple pieces of information streaming in at them every second, but they will lack the means—literally the very circuits in the brain—for deeper revelation.” This may seem premature to mention in a conversation about infants and toddlers, but it is not. The growing array of digital devices that “talk” to us now—from touch-screen phones and self-check registers at the grocery store, to toys, games, books, and apps specifically targeting the infant-toddler user—is only growing faster, more sophisticated, and more enticing. Your baby will join that culture soon enough. For now, take the TV out of the room, power down screens, pick up a book, and read with your child. Let your baby plug into you.
Turn Down the Volume on Commercial Pitches and Promises of Parenting Paradise
Advertising and marketing campaigns, upbeat blogs, and media buzz are designed to make you feel understood (We know how exhausting/exciting parenting can be!), to win your trust (You want what’s best for your baby and so do we!), to appeal to your parental aspirations and insecurities about their academic futures (Build your baby’s learning skills!), and to seal the deal (Here’s a free game—click to buy the better version for just a buck!). Our human predilection for instrumental parenting—the happy habit of giving our children material things—coupled with the desire to help our children prepare for success in school and among peers, sets us up. We are not only a target market, we are sitting ducks.
Science, medicine, and a world of caring experts advise caution about plugging your infant or toddler in to screens and tech, but advertisers and our tech-happy culture send a very different message—and loudly. It is hard enough to be a vulnerable, loving, sleep-deprived parent, but to be told by other parents and marketers that you’re depriving your child by not exposing him to the latest and greatest Baby Einstein toys can feel overwhelming. There is a cautionary tale in Baby Einstein, the best-selling “educational” product Disney was eventually forced to recall for making false promises. Or the Federal Trade Commission’s 2012 action against the makers of a product that promised, “Your baby can read.” But that has not kept others from saying what they wish to promote products. While companies push products they claim will make babies smarter sooner and happier longer, most have no credible evidence to support their claims and often research specifically refutes them. Even among those which experts say show some learning potential, few are designed for children under two years old and none have been proven to make children smarter or more school ready, according to Common Sense Media.
The most insidious thing is that these voices are not just selling a product, they are selling a way of life, an unchallenged assumption that tech is fine for babies, great for parents, and the sooner you join the crowd, the happier you and your baby will be. An online blogger whose daughter is ten months old writes that, as parents, we’ve all wished at times that we had that “magic wand to make our babies happy” and apps for babies offer “simple, safe distractions for those times when you need it!”
He routinely uses his iPhone to entertain his baby girl as long as necessary, he says, reassuring readers that one particular game “offers up a fun, colorful educational delight.” Fun, maybe, and colorful, no doubt. But educational? Safe? We know that from birth to two the brain is learning not just what to think but how to think, and we know that tech and TV pose risks for your baby’s healthy development. With convenience and consumerism driving the conversation, empirical research can seem so remote, so out of step with what’s popular.
Other reviewers and bloggers ramp up the conversation about “best apps” for babies and toddlers, hailing the smartphone as the smart parent’s answer to the timeless need to entertain, educate, or pacify your child. Again, the claims ignore the science and the warnings from experts. When you filter out the flimsy advice, the flawed reasoning, and the manipulative language, what is left is an eerily honest pitch to make things easy on yourself and hook your child on screens as early as possible:
If you have a small kid, the iPad bandwagon beckons . . . Touch screens were made for little kids, and the bigger the touch screen, the better.
[My smartphone] gives me the ability to check in with e-mails, calendars, friends, and social networking sites without having to stop what I’m doing with my children.
Many of these toys will do more than just suck those little brains in and get them glued to yet another screen. Choose right, and their favorite new tech toy could help teach them about math, science, physics, digital photography, computer programming, or even motivate them to go outside and learn more about good ol’ Mother Nature.
Not really. Your toddler isn’t developmentally ready to understand content about math, science, and digital photography. And screen time—a mostly visual stimulus—fails to build the more robust neural configurations needed to do that later. As for “good ol’ Mother Nature,” the best way to learn more about her is to go outside and spend time with her.
Everywhere, the loose use of persuasive language covers sins of omission. Sure, a game may be “fun” or “entertaining” for a baby, but every minute they spend engaged that way is altering brain growth in ways that we know can be detrimental. “It’s a culture of stimulation and that’s the drug,” says my colleague Ned Hallowell, a psychiatrist, noted authority, and author in the field of ADD and ADHD. “Stimulation has replaced connection, and I think that’s what you need to watch out for.”
An app is not a “safe distraction” like a stuffed animal or a musical mobile. An app is a stimulant, and overstimulating a baby’s brain is not safe. Nor is an app educational in the way a parent would hope. I am hearing from parents of children two and a half and three years old—the age when children are old enough to benefit from high-quality educational toys—that having grown accustomed to touch-screen fun, they are less interested in those truly educational toys. They have already “learned”—to love audio, visual, and the fast-twitch stimulation of tech toys.
Few things could be more enticing than the prospect of flipping a switch to keep a baby happy. But when we give babies stimulants instead of calming attention and offer tech distractions from ordinary life instead of guidance through it, we teach them at a very young age to deal with life’s up and downs by plugging into external sources to self-regulate rather than develop those skills within. It is so hard for ordinary, real-life academic research to compete with the magic-wand offerings of marketing wizards. Packaging on electronics for infants and toddlers should just say honestly: “This product may be hazardous to your baby’s brain, to cognitive, social, and emotional development, and to early bonding, attachment, and attunement between parent and child.” Until that day comes, you just have to say it to yourself—and spread the word. We owe it to our children to be as informed, sensible, and protective as possible.
Alice in Wonderland’s Wake-Up Call
Alice came to see me when she realized that her careful choices to keep tech in check for her two young daughters had not kept her from tumbling down the rabbit hole into the “buy me” wonderland of the digital life.
In their peaceful rural Maine home Alice and her husband had diligently maintained a mostly screen-free existence for several years after their first daughter was born. Alice and little Meg spent happy unpressured hours outdoors. They folded laundry, pulled weeds, and pushed the vacuum cleaner around together. Reading, cooking, and arts and crafts were favorite indoor pastimes. When errands and playgroups took them into town, in the car they listened to music and sang or chatted. They had a computer, but Alice didn’t use it much. She didn’t have the time or interest.
Four years later, with the birth of her second daughter, Janie, Alice decided to get a smartphone. All her friends had one and e-mailed and texted one another throughout the day. Alice felt left out. She also imagined having the phone would help her organize and stay ahead of her to-do list, scheduling appointments and play-dates, shopping online, and keeping up with correspondence. Phone reception was spotty in their rural area and Alice soon found herself driving alternate routes on her way home, sometimes going twenty and thirty minutes out of her way so she’d never find herself without a signal. She went online more now at home, too, discovered parenting blogs and enjoyed the conversations there and on Facebook.
More open now to the fun and functionality of tech at home, Alice eased up on the whole screen-free thing for the girls, too. Meg, now five, often watched DVDs while her mom tended Janie. Depending on the chaos level of the day, Meg might watch one movie and listen to audio books or she might be given two movies and then play games on the Internet throughout the afternoon and evening. Propped on a blanket or buckled into her baby swing, Janie often watched with her while Alice did housework or went online. Sometimes when Alice played with Janie she also sneaked a peek at e-mail or Facebook, cruised online, or texted with her mom and sister who lived at a distance.
The days rolled along this way, the time with her girls and the time on screens merging into a seamless interaction between mother, daughters—and electronic devices. Then one day, at around eighteen months, Janie, in the midst of her toddler babbling, shouted what was clearly an effort at her first sentence: “My pone! My pone!” At first Alice couldn’t decipher Janie’s words, then her heart sank as she did. Janie screamed this every time Alice picked up her cell phone. Obviously she was trying to say “My phone! My phone!” Whether she wanted Alice to stop being distracted by the device or simply wanted to play with it wasn’t clear and didn’t matter. When Alice realized that this phrase would go down in their family history as Janie’s first words, it was a turning point. She felt sad, guilty, and discouraged.
“I am an entirely different mother for Janie than I was for Meg as a baby,” she tells me. “My attention now is divided not only between my two kids, but then it’s cut in half again by my needing to check my phone for e-mails or texts every three minutes.” She confesses that she’d come to think more routinely about when she would be able to check her phone than to figure out what game she might play that would be fun for both girls. “It’s ridiculous. I’m a stay-at-home mother,” Alice exclaims, “and I barely spend time with my kids.”
“We’d come so far,” she says of the earlier years of homespun fun and outdoor play with Meg, “only for me to blow the whole thing.” Alice hadn’t “blown the whole thing.” The fact that she is sitting in my office wanting to make a change was a clear sign that this was not the case. The reality for us all is that we and our children are together on the learning curve in the digital age, and each developmental stage all along the way is going to bring new challenges, different dilemmas, and opportunities for mistakes and course corrections.
Alice was committed to making the shift and began by examining her own growing dependency on tech, how it was overpowering her and steering her choices for her girls. She could also see how screen time had interrupted Meg’s desire to do other things she had begun to express an interest in earlier—read books on her own, play with her sister, explore outside. Janie was plugged in far more than her sister had ever been at that age and was losing out on just the kind of discovery play and mommy-and-me time that Alice had once guarded so fiercely for Meg. Among other things, Janie clearly had developed a sense of competition with the phone for her mother’s attention.
Janie’s clarion call motivated Alice to refocus and reconnect with what she intuitively knew: that the most important message your infant or toddler needs to get is the message of “we” as strong and powerful and what fundamentally matters. When they are distressed they need to know they matter the most to you; when they want to see themselves in your eyes and share the wonder of discovery with you, they need to know you are their reliable partner.
New Pathways of the Heart and Mind
As hard as it is to get up night after night with your infant, I believe there is brilliant architecture in nature’s design. As parents, our babies call us into a shared experience of solitude from the moment they arrive. They teach us how to find solace and comfort in dark hours as we comfort them. On a good night we do or, if that is not to be, we learn to stay the course and love them anyway. Whether in the nursery or the rocking chair, we create sanctuary with our babies. We make a sacred space. The moments and hours we spend in that close communion train the intuitive sense of mind and heart.
Those moments can also connect us to the “something larger,” a sense of connection to mothers and fathers throughout time and to the spiritual dimension of parenting. This is an experience you cannot access online. Being with our babies has the enormous potential to help us as adults to rewire our busy brains and rediscover or develop new neural pathways that deepen our capacity for quiet reflection. Having a baby recalibrates your ability to commune with yourself in a new and satisfying way.
Nowadays when we gather in sanctuaries outside our home, instead of the officiant beginning with a spiritual welcome, so often they begin with the familiar invocation: “Would everybody please make sure their cell phones are off.” We oblige because we understand that there are times and places that call for us to be fully present to the moment without the distraction of tech. We can let that be a cue for us as parents, too.
Let your baby’s room be a screen-free room. Let the space between you be tech free. Read to your baby without interruption. Keep your eyes on your baby as she’s crawling and climbing. When your left-brain multitasker says, “Just do it,” let your right-brain relational self respond, “Just say no.” Create rituals for you and your baby, and separate rituals for you and your screen. Preserve what your infant needs from you and give yourself the uninterrupted time to get your work done. Of course there will be times you will need to take a call, check an e-mail, or multitask. But the more we can do this mindfully and consistently for our children, the more likely we are to preserve the primacy of we.