Researchers find once again young children watching too many videos negatively impacts speech development

After studying the impact of common media use on young children, researchers have found once again that young children watching too many videos per day suffer from poorer speech development. Like moms of decades past reminding children not to watch TV too long, modern moms should limit their children’s exposure to watching videos on smartphones, tablets, and computers to ensure good language skills development.

A group of researchers led by S. Kucker at the Southern Methodist University in Texas examined the ways different media were used by parents of young children versus language development. Caregivers of 302 children were recruited to report on their children’s daily media activities and the reasons for using them.

The common media used and minutes used daily were: Watching videos (121~ minutes), reading books (60~ min.), video chatting (16~ min.), reading e-books (16~ min.), and playing video games (15~ min.). The common reasons for using media were: Educating children, calming them, occupying them, enjoying time together, and connecting with them.

In statistics, there’s the concept of significance. When something in research is found to be significant, this means the likelihood of something occurring by chance is low. This does not mean the study results are 100% correct.

The researchers found that regardless of media usage reason there was a statistically significant relationship between the hours of video watched per day and the stunting of a child’s vocabulary and length of utterances. Another way to say it is the children didn’t know as many words and didn’t speak as well when they watched lots of videos.

One exception they found was that when a parent was trying to connect with their child, the length of utterances wasn’t affected, but the child’s vocabulary was still stunted. This was likely due to parents encouraging their children to talk.

Overall, children of richer parents or more educated parents in this study watched less video while the opposite occurred with poorer or lower educated parents. Nevertheless, readers can take action today by limiting their children’s video viewing to less than an hour per day as recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics. Why not spend time with your children in a healthier activity by buying a soccer ball or a musical instrument.