Tag Archives: screen time

My kitchen counter has changed a lot over the last six years. What used to be dedicated to a bowl of fruit, a coffee maker, various papers, and mail that I hadn’t gotten around to throwing away yet has since become a mess of wires coiling back to one put-upon outlet. A rotating set of smartphones, tablets, Bluetooth speakers, and headphones have made their way to the counter as well, pointing to a broader set of changes in the house.…

On a recent visit to Los Angeles, I had the opportunity to lead 15 Spanish-speaking moms on a field test of a new media and technology workshop produced by Abriendo Puertas-Opening Doors and Common Sense Latino, a Common Sense Media initiative. Developed through two years of collaboration and research, the workshop is designed to provide lower-income parents and caregivers with a roadmap to navigate the digital world safely, teaching them how to use technology for learning and create a balanced media experience for their families. During the field test, we spent over two hours completing activities, showing…

This post was originally published on The Hechinger Report and appears here with permission. Over the past several years, at the same time that the words “screen time” became shorthand for children zoning out, several researchers and educational experts have been taking an entirely different track. They have been studying how and at what age children come to learn words, follow stories, and grasp educational concepts that appear in ebooks, videos, and apps. New experiments on The Adventures of SuperWhy!, Peg+Catand…

Today’s announcement by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the joint statement of the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on “media use and young minds” is a timely response to a hot debate in parenting and early childhood circles: When and how often should young children use screens? For years, the health and child development establishment has advised against exposing toddlers, and babies in particular, to screen media.  But daily life has…

Now that digital technologies—and touch-screen tablets in particular—are finding their way into preschool and kindergarten classrooms, educators are faced with multiple questions about if, how, and when it is best to introduce them to young children. On September 3rd, the U.S. Department of Education brought together nearly 60 people from across the early childhood field to think through what would be of most help. At least three needs became apparent throughout the day: Educators and parents need  succinct, research-based messages…

Televisions, touchscreens, and smartphones are now almost ubiquitous in homes. Many young children are watching, listening to, or interacting with two to three hours of screen media per day. In the latest installment of the Ideas Lunch series at the Governance Lab, a Brooklyn-based action research lab focused on the use of new technology to govern better, the Cooney Center’s Michael Levine explained that rather than portending the death of reading, devices, apps, and tools can help children learn by…

Can you turn screen time into family time?  Our new resource, Family Time with Apps: A Guide to Using Apps with Your Kids, provides tips on how apps can be a part of family learning, communication and connecting to one another.  Starting today, it is available to download for free from the iBook store. The guide is an extension of our research on how families use and learn from media.  From Learning: Is there an app for that? to Learning…

The technology available to the youngest children is evolving rapidly, according to the results of a new survey from Common Sense Media. The survey of more than 1400 parents of children 8 and younger found access to mobile devices and time spent on those devices had increased dramatically from the last survey done two years ago. Common Sense Media produced an infographic that has the highlights of the survey. According to some within Common Sense Media, the results should be…

I wasn’t going to blog about the American Academy of Pediatrics recent update to its 1999 policy statement, which discouraged media use for children under the age of 2.  Why not?  Because numerous experts much more knowledgeable than I already provided excellent commentary on the report.  Both Warren Buckleitner and David Kleeman effectively summarized the statement’s inadequacies.  Moms with Apps did a nice job interpreting the report into usable tips for parents.   And Sesame Workshop’s Jennifer Kotler and Rosemarie Truglio…