Raising Children in the Digital Age
When young children use digital technology, do they miss out on valuable childhood experiences?
Without it, do they fall behind?
Does it come down to parental engagement?
Three Georgetown researchers are inventing novel ways to study these questions and contributing to international conversations about childrearing.
Psychology professor Rachel Barr started the Georgetown University Early Learning Project (ELP) to study the ways children glean information about the world during the first two years of their lives.
“Children are surrounded by input and stimulation,” says Barr. “We know from over a hundred years of developmental science that they are really shaped by those influences. Their brains are so plastic, so ready to learn.” Enter Georgetown’s Jesuit mission to serve the greater good: “At ELP we want to provide every child with the best resources to pick up information.”
Since children draw information from family, media, and languages, all of which vary across countries and communities, Barr needed to collect global research data in a concerted way. So she connected researchers from Michigan to Germany to Australia with expertise in sleep, stress, eye tracking, longitudinal design, and many other fields to launch the Comprehensive Assessment of Family Media Exposure (CAFE) Consortium.
Instead of just tallying the amount of time children spend using media, the CAFE Consortium measures complete household use of media to assess the content and context of early media exposure. Researchers divided up factors like screen-based or physical learning, indoor or outdoor learning, and media use by parents when the child is present or absent.
The study requires parents to assess their family access to different media devices—ranging from entertainment systems and gaming consoles to virtual assistants. Parents then install and run an app on all household mobile devices to track usage patterns. With feasibility tests completed, CAFE members will submit the preliminary findings for publication early in 2019. Barr partners with organizations like ZERO TO THREE, a nonprofit devoted to improving the science of early childhood. Working together with data collected by CAFE members and others, Barr, Rebecca Palarkian from ZERO TO THREE, and Georgetown alumna Elisabeth McClure (G’13, ’16) released the 2018 “Screen Sense” guidelines for parents, childcare providers, and policymakers.
“Parents are trying to figure out how to raise their kids in the best possible way and they’re going to different sources for advice such as pediatricians and child development organizations,” says Barr. “But those sources are all entirely dependent on empirical research like what we do in the consortium. All of this advice has to be evidence-based.”
Researching the Role of Parental Mediation
A child sits in a dark room, playing a computer game on a bright screen, eyes darting below a black cap covered in light-emitting sensors attached by dozens of wires to a machine that records brain signals.
A lot of times teachers feel like they have to compete with media characters. We want them to be allies.
To learn more about the ways in which the brain works while children are learning using media, Georgetown researchers use functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), a non-invasive brain-imaging technique that shines low-level light on a child’s head. The fNIRS sensors measure how much light bounces back, and readouts from the cap show which parts of the brain are activated when a child engages with media.
This “Media and the Mind” neuroimaging research at ELP started as a dissertation by graduate student Sylvia Rusnak (G’22) and will continue beyond her graduation. Rusnak is particularly interested in how children learn directly from others as compared to how they learn via video chat. She is also interested in how learning from interactive apps differs from learning with tangible objects. While the research is in its early stage, Rusnak, with guidance from Communication, Culture & Technology (CCT) professor Evan Barba, constructed a remote button for this original research technique. The study will address how the brain registers the differences between learning via an app or video chat versus via a real person and real objects.
Another series of studies conducted at the ELP demonstrated that children have difficulty transferring what they learn from an app to a physical puzzle. Children ages 1-3 years were shown how to play a puzzle game on a touchscreen; the same children were then asked to play the game with a physical puzzle board. The researchers found a gap between interactive app learning and offscreen learning. The learning gap shortened when parents showed children how to solve the physical puzzle.
“When you look at lots of images of children and media, the child is often alone,” says Barr. “It’s very hard for a child to learn on their own. But if you invite adults in, they can support that learning. It becomes digital play!”
Programming Friends to Assist Parents and Teachers
Psychology professor Sandra Calvert thought she would become a preschool teacher until she met an academic who studied Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and the idea of studying a TV show’s mass effect on children captured her imagination.
“I realized that if I learned how to use educational media, I could impact millions of children at one time,” says Calvert.
Calvert now leads the Children’s Digital Media Center (CDMC) at Georgetown, which is funded by the National Science Foundation. CDMC aims to understand how interactive digital-media experiences affect children’s short- and long-term social adjustment, academic achievement, and personal identity. This consortium of scholars, researchers, educators, policy-makers, and industry professionals aims to improve the digital-media environment in which children live and learn.
Calvert has moved beyond studying the amount of time children spend on media devices, now focusing on the components of their media diets. She says that the key factors in children’s learning from educational media are repetition, complexity, engaging characters, captivating and comprehensible stories, and parental involvement.
“The content in a video is constant, but the messages that a child takes away can be more and more complex, especially if the parent helps them and guides them,” says Calvert.
Parents are just one part of the developmental puzzle; Calvert also studies the effect of fictional characters on children’s educational development. Recently, CDMC has been conducting studies on the effects of parasocial relationships, which are one-sided, emotionally tinged relationships with media characters that hold social and emotional value. For example, a child can bond to Elmo from Sesame Street in ways that are similar to their bonds with a human friend.
“Children tend to treat characters as real people,” says Calvert. “The line between what’s real and what’s pretend for young children is much fuzzier than it is for adults. And just like you learn more from your favorite teachers in life because you care about them, young children learn more from their favorite media characters because they care about them.”
What matters in a world increasingly dependent on digital technologies is whether a child can parse how media is manipulating them.
Looking towards the future of classroom-to-home lessons, Calvert is particularly interested in how media characters could become educational aids to teachers and parents.
“Children now live in a transmedia world where the characters drive messages across boundaries,” from screens to home to school, says Calvert, noting that “you can program knowledge into a friend who is a media character.” Calvert believes that teachable friends could assist educators. “A lot of times teachers feel like they have to compete with media characters. We want them to be allies.”
The CDMC is currently investigating whether children learn early math skills better from characters who interact in intelligent ways. To do so, Calvert, Barba, and former CCT student Stevie Chancellor (G’14) developed a computer game, “Diego’s Birthday,” in which children play with an intelligent character from Dora the Explorer who appears to understand them. This program was effective in teaching early math skills. But research in the field of child development frequently has to play catch-up to the media it studies; Barba has found that the original game platform requires rethinking. He and Calvert applied for a grant to modify the game for transmedia education.
“It’s a really complex learning environment right now, and we need to think about all the different ways that we have opportunities to engage kids,” says Barba.
Reaching Underserved Children and Fathers
Aware of income-based discrepancies in early-childhood learning, Georgetown researchers are also considering how digital media might facilitate learning in families with fewer resources and more challenges.
Over the past decade the ELP and Youth Law Center—which advocates transforming foster-care and juvenile-justice systems—have collaborated on a media-based intervention for incarcerated teen parents called “Just Beginning,” dubbed the “Baby Elmo” program by the teen fathers. The program provides coaching and videos featuring Sesame Street characters—including muppet Baby Elmo and his father—to teach fathers by example how to play with their visiting infants and toddlers. The study found that participants who finished the program demonstrated more sensitive and responsive parenting skills such as following their child’s lead, praising, encouraging, and talking with their child.
Barr recounts how one day in the juvenile justice facility she saw a young father watching Baby Elmo and smiling. “He said, ‘I can imagine how my daughter would love this and I can play with her.’ It was immediately a connection that he could have.”
“Over the past 40 years, Sesame Street has provided a very important resource, particularly for low-income families,” Barr notes. “In high-resourced homes, there are lots of different choices. But in low-resourced homes, technology is a really great equalizer. With PBS, when you track kids over time, it’s the kids in low-resourced homes who are benefitting the most from high-quality media.”
Parenting in a World of Evolving Technologies
A toddler sits on a parent’s lap, waving to a grandparent through video chat. The parent shows the toddler how to hold a raisin up to the screen to “feed” the grandparent. The grandparent holds up a raisin as though they are pulling it through the screen and eats it with gusto. The toddler giggles and reaches for another raisin.
As media evolves, Barr has seen it connect generations. Using video chat technology can help young children form nurturing relationships with people regardless of time and distance.
Barba, who has two daughters under the age of 8, adds that the question of whether digital media hurts brain development is always relative. He argues that a child’s brain is developing in valuable ways by interacting with a TV, for example.
“It provides incredibly complex narratives, moral questions, lots of motion and color that they need to process,” says Barba. “Their brain is doing work there, and who are we to say if that work is positive or negative?”
In her work, Barr meets many parents anxious to set their children up for success. “People are worried with questions like ‘If I don’t give my kids access to tech, will they fall behind? How do I protect them but also help them experience childhood?’” they ask her. “Parents are really trying to juggle these things.”
When you track kids over time, it’s the kids in low-resourced homes who are benefitting the most from high-quality media.
Barba sees critical media consumption as a tool necessary for all children growing up in the digital age. What matters in a world increasingly dependent on digital technologies, in Barba’s view, is whether a child can parse how media is manipulating them.
“I think people forget that being able to digest and consume media is a skill that needs to be learned and honed,” says Barba. “If you never show your child anything on a television or a computer, you’re doing them a real disservice, because they need that fundamental literacy.”
When Barr hears grandparents claim that technology is melting their grandkids’ brains, she says there is moral panic with every new technology; people feared that writing would harm the memory system, that radio would end conversations, and that television would wreak havoc.
“There’s nothing ever new in the world, but humans have an incredible ability to use tools,” says Barr. “Oftentimes people will only think about what the device is doing to them, rather than how humans have developed all of these different tools. It’s how we use the tools that is more important.”
As a father, Barba believes the only constant throughout the history of human parenting is parental concern. In ancient times, when the most advanced technologies were made of stone, parents still fretted about whether children would use rocks as weapons or as tools.
“I don’t think being a dad in this age is any different from being a dad in the Stone Age,” says Barba. “You are always worried about your kid wielding that rock.”
