According to a new university study, it’s not just teenagers, but preschoolers as well caught up in the electronic media craze. In fact, there is little or no parent-child interaction or conversation with children three to five years of age while they are using media such as television, video games or mobile devices.
It’s not that the loss of conversational skills between parents and children hasn’t been discussed before because this very issue has been studied before. But this time, instead of relying on self-reporting by parents tracking their children’s time spent using electronic media, something different was tried.
The new University of Michigan study used enhanced audio equipment to track the home environment of preschoolers as they interacted with parents in 2010 and 2011. The team used 44 families, subjecting them to 10 hours of daily audio recordings that monitored interaction between the children and parents.
The recording output on the audio record automatically picked up a media signal when a device was used. This allowed researchers to code the type of media used and transcribe any media-related talk in the home. Demographic differences were also examined in their relationship to media used and parent-child communications.
The findings were somewhat surprising. Children of mothers with graduate degrees actually had far less media exposure than the children of mothers who had only graduated from high school or maybe had one year of college classes. Lead author Nicholas Waters also said that mothers who were highly educated were more apt to discuss media with their children, and their children watched more educational programs on television.
“Importantly, children of mothers with less than a graduate degree were exposed to media without any dialogue related to the media content for the vast majority of the time,” said co-author Sarah Domoff. She claims that these parents practice “active mediation” of television and other types of media, they are mitigating the risks associated with media exposure.
Domoff presented the findings May 29 at the annual Association for Psychological Science conference in Chicago. While the study is interesting in the context of communication between parents and children over media content, it did not go into the issue of the increased use of all types of electronic media by children, especially smartphones, along their absorption with texting.
