When I moved from Chapel Hill to coastal Wilmington, NC, I couldn’t help noticing people’s feet. Where in Chapel Hill shoes ran the gamut from open-toed Birkenstocks to closed-toe Birkenstocks, the official footwear of Wilmington was the sandal. There were the cheap plastic kind tourists grabbed at Walgreens, the Brazilian kind that looked just like those but cost 10 times as much, and, for weddings and business presentations, leather Rainbows, although some iconoclasts chose Reefs with their sole-mounted it’s-5:00-somewhere bottle-openers. Winter saw the emergence of shearling-lined flip-flops, a shoe that dared the uninitiated to ask, “Why?”
People are now calling my attention to a different kind of “flip-flop,” the American Academy of Pediatrics’s (AAP’s) reconsideration of our media use guidelines, a process we kicked off this September with a commentary that I co-authored for AAP News. Reaction came swiftly and was all over the map, from a Forbes article asserting that we had finally learned to stop worrying and love the media to a well-balanced piece in the Wall Street Journal to a critical blog post in PLOS accusing us of turning our backs on decades of solid science.
As the chair of the AAP’s Council on Communications and Media, I was not surprised at the range of reactions to our statement, but I do think that it’s important to explain what we are and are not doing. First, the commentary — “Beyond Turn It Off: How to Advise Families on Media Use” — this article was no more and no less than the summary of what we learned at an AAP-sponsored academic meeting, the Growing Up Digital Media Research Symposium held in May of this year. We invited pediatricians, psychologists, educators, activists, and industry executives to meet with AAP leadership and discuss what we do and do not know about the health effects of media on infants, children, and adolescents. Our report from that meeting does provide a perspective on our current thinking, but it does not supplant any official AAP policy or guidelines.
We convened the symposium out of an acute awareness that mobile and interactive technology is both novel and ubiquitous in our children’s lives. The evidence base that informs our policy rests overwhelmingly on studies of television and movies; most of our data were generated when video calls were confined to The Jetsons (a show that also foretold the ascendance of the treadmill desk). We know that these technologies are here to stay and that our advice to parents has to acknowledge their presence. So what should that advice be?
The answer, pitched as revolutionary by many, was in truth evolutionary. Media platforms may be changing rapidly, but human nature is not. For example, kids still get together to study, to hang out with friends, and to do good for society; social media catalyze these activities in unprecedented ways. These same platforms, however, also mediate bullying, sexting, and self-harm behaviors. We are handing our children a powerful set of tools; parenting involves helping kids learn to use them responsibly.
When the AAP first recommended that kids limit their media time to 2 hours a day, it was because viewing television beyond that threshold was strongly associated with increased rates of overweight and obesity. Newer data suggest that this effect still holds, but it does not seem to translate to computer, telephone, or video game use, except to the extent that these devices are still often being used to watch television. Is two hours the magic limit for other deleterious effects of media use? We don’t know, but I’m going to guess that the answer depends very much on the activity.
Another fact has not changed, at least not yet: young children learn best from other people or, as my friend and colleague Dimitri Christakis recently told the New York Times, “Children need laps more than apps.” While overwhelming data support a language deficit attributable to excessive television exposure in young children, the data that favor screen-based learning in children under age two remain preliminary and underwhelming and are limited to real-time screen-based interactions with other people. Will we continue to discourage screen time for children under age two? My guess is the answer will be the same: it depends what they’re doing with it: does that time foster interpersonal interaction or displace it?
Dr. David Hill, Chair, American Academy of Pediatrics Council on Communications and Media, will be discussing screen time with The Family Online Safety Institute CEO Stephen Balkam, at the 2015 FOSI Annual Conference. Register to attend.
Photos courtesy of Flicker.
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