Watching Screens with Parents Can Help Children's Literacy
Many parents find it difficult to reduce their children's screen use, and worry about how too much time watching videos or playing electronic games might affect their learning.
But a new study found that some electronic screen use can be positive for children's literacy — if they share it with their parents, such as watching television together.
Watching television with their parents probably helps children's literacy because they can "talk about things in the show," the researchers said.
The researchers looked at data from over 2,000 studies that were written from 1954 to 2021.
They found that what children do while using screens is more important than how much screen time they have.
Some screen use has small effects on children's health, such as a link between their mental health and how much time they spend on social media, the researchers wrote in Nature Human Behaviour.
Watching more television or online videos is linked to poorer literacy, except when a show is educational or is watched with parents.
Passive screen use — just watching — is worse for children than interactive screen use, such as playing games or using educational apps, the researchers said.
They said parents should think more about what their children do on their screens than how much time they do it for.
"Parents are being told screen time is bad, and they are rightly very worried about it, but maybe they don't need to be," said researcher Taren Sanders of the Australian Catholic University.
If parents make sensible decisions about what their children can use their screens for, in a similar way to choosing books for them, the risks are probably lower than people thought, Sanders said.
