If you want to improve your child’s learning, cut down your screen time

While parents and policymakers alike have gone to great lengths to reduce kids' screen time, they may be targeting the wrong subjects. 

It turns out that parents' smartphone use may be just as harmful, if not more, to their children's development. So found a recent study conducted on children in Norway. 

The study, titled "Screen Use and Children’s Language Development From Ages 5 to 7 Years" by Junyi Yang, Bjarte Furnes and Frøydis Morken, analyzed the digital habits of 747 Norwegian children and their families. 

The results may have parents taking a look in the mirror—or, perhaps these days, turning the camera around for a selfie. 

Specifically, parental smartphone use appeared to be affecting their children's language skills, while kids' own screen time did not show the same effect. As the study states, "Most screen use indicators were not associated with children’s language growth. However, primary parent smartphone screen time was associated with slower growth in receptive vocabulary." Each additional hour of smartphone use per day by the parent contributed to slower growth in kids' vocabulary test scores. 

Parents' use of technology is not the only problem

The study also points to another adverse factor in child language development: digital device ownership. 

The authors found that "children who owned a digital device at age 4 to 5 years scored lower" than their non-device-owning peers in assessments of receptive grammar and vocabulary. 

Screen usage indicators among children, however, did not show much direct correlation with language performance. What appeared to be a more determining factor among the group studied is simply whether or not the child had a device, not necessarily how much they used it. 

In fact, another recent Finnish study found that subjects who used screens more when they were children showed higher cognitive processing as teenagers. 

Are screens actually good for kids? 

While the study of the children in Norway suggests that parents' screen time has a greater effect than kids' on developmental linguistic skills, this does not imply that the effects of the latter are negligible.  

As established, children who own devices also saw their own language skills negatively affected. While the results didn't change much with the magnitude of use, kids who did not own such technology showed higher receptive grammar and vocabulary scores than their peers who did. 

And even though the aforementioned Finnish study suggests kids' screen time having positive impacts on cognition, it does reiterate that "low levels of physical activity among adolescents remain a significant public health concern" and that "sedentary behavior has been associated with poorer academic achievement."

The University of Jyväskylä's Petri Jalanko, one of the researches in this study, also emphasized that screen time is not the be-all, end-all of how technology use affects development. What is more important, he says, is the types of tasks that these devices are being used for. 

"Presumably, the essential point here is what kind of things they do in their screen time. Teachers and parents should encourage children to use devices and screens in such ways that promote active thinking, problem-solving, creativity and learning," he said.