The more babies watched screens at 1, the more likely they had communication and problem-solving delays at 4.
50 years of research on the impact of media on children’s behavior has informed models of child development. Research illustrates the impact of environment on development: How parents manage media input matters.In 1976, I had been designing research on the effects of television on children’s imaginative play, cognitive, emotional and prosocial behaviors. My 3-year old son sometimes joined me in watching the tapes ofthat we were using in our nursery school experiment.
The following week, as soon as the operating room set appeared on the show, my son turned to me and asked, “This isn’t funny, is it, Mom?”, was spot on: Modeling and mediating content are major means of teaching. They can be effective when media distorts lessons you do or don’t want learned. Parents need to know what messages their children are ingesting. Across the past five decades, our understanding of biological as well as environmental influences on children’s growth has taken quantum leaps. Ecological models offered a systems theory approach, within which individual characteristics both influence and interact with those from a child and their environment.