Parenting In The Age Of Apps: Is That iPad Help Or Harm?

With tablet technology still relatively new, pediatricians are trying to understand how interactive media affects children.

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ARUN RATH, HOST: Welcome to the Kids Table. Here at ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, we've created a place to sit down and talk about, well, kids and everything to do with being a parent. And it's impossible to be a parent today without managing your kids' media consumption. Believe me, that is not easy. And it seems there's a new device every month.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has guidelines about how much TV time is too much, which is great, but so last century. Parents now, we're worried about the iPad. Are all those apps good for little brains? Dr. Dimitri Christakis is a pediatrician, and he spent a lot of time researching kids and media. He says the thing to look out for is how your kids are interacting with the device.

DIMITRI CHRISTAKIS: One thing that children of all ages never say or never even think when they interact with passive media is: I did it, because, of course, you don't do anything when you watch a screen. But you do do things when you interact with a touch-screen device. And children of all ages, but especially young children, are very, very keen to interact with their environment and make something happen. It's an essential part of their learning and, frankly, of their brain development.

RATH: And you draw distinctions within a medium. Say, in television, there's a big difference for you between, say, watching "The Powerpuff Girls" and "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood."

CHRISTAKIS: No, that's absolutely right. One of the things that we have found in our study of young children in media is that a lot of the problems are associated with what we call overstimulation. The medium can be too fast. It's surreally paced. And that can overstimulate and ultimately damage young brains.

RATH: One of the things that was really fascinating in your work was that you talked about how - well, the effect that we can see of hyper-stimulation on mice.

CHRISTAKIS: Right. It's funny. There's only so much you can't do with live infants. You - we can't bring them into the lab and overstimulate them for many years watching fast-paced programs and look at the effects on their brain. And so we've developed a mouse model of overstimulation using, if you will, mouse TV. And we find that over-stimulated mice, mice who watch television excessively during their childhood, have real deficits in their cognition. In fact, they're hyperactive and they take all kinds of risks that normal mice wouldn't take.

RATH: But not in a heroic good way we might think about.

CHRISTAKIS: No. No. They spend way too much time, for example, in the middle of an open field, which is a very dangerous thing to do as a mouse because you have very few friends in the natural world.

RATH: There's been a lot of research on the effects of television, but iPads and tablets, they're fairly new. Do we have any research so far?

CHRISTAKIS: We have to take a step back and remind ourselves that iPads are only four years old. And most of us can't even conceive of a world that existed before iPads. They feel like they've been here forever. And unfortunately, the pace of research is much, much slower than the pace of technological advances. And so in making my recommendation to parents now, I'm relying on the best available evidence. And frankly, a strong theoretical framework would suggest that judicious use of these touch-screen technologies, I think, is fine and may even be beneficial.

And incidentally, I should also point out that there's no reason whatsoever that a caregiver can't use an app with their child. It's a great opportunity for what we call joint attention. The interactions between a child and a caregiver, the back and forth, which is critical, not just to language development but to brain development.

RATH: So - sort of the way that you would with a book with your child. It's the two of you engaging in it together.

CHRISTAKIS: Absolutely. In fact, that's really what reading with your child does. It provides an opportunity for you two to interact. And all of the back and forth that goes on there can happen with a touch-screen device and, in fact, maybe even more so, depending on the design of the app.

RATH: Dr. Dimitri Christakis is a pediatrician who studies the effects of screen time on young kids. Dr. Christakis, thank you so much.

CHRISTAKIS: Thank you.

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