Employment, fatigue, lack of strength or elementary desire… When parents, for one reason or another, cannot devote enough time to communicating with their child, there is a great temptation to shift the care of his entertainment to electronic toys. But will this benefit the child and how will it affect its development?
The reality is that in many families due to financial problems, employment and other factors, parents cannot spend much time playing with young children. But scientists are sure that finding a healthy balance between one’s own employment and communication with a child is important for his development.
Reading is the best?
Anna V. Sosa, Ph.D. from Northern Arizona University, and colleagues conducted an experiment involving 26 parent-infant couples with children aged 10 to 16 months. The researchers were not directly present at parent-child games, as they were held in the participants’ homes. But by agreement, there was a sound recording equipment placed there, so that they had the opportunity to understand how the game was going.
Parents were provided with three sets of toys: electronic – children’s laptop, cell phone and “talking farm”; traditional – a wooden puzzle, a set for sorting figures and cubes with pictures; five books about animals, shapes or colors.
Parents spoke fewer words while playing with traditional toys than while reading books
While playing with the electronic set, adults used much fewer words and speech patterns, there were fewer parental responses and meaningful phrases than when playing with traditional toys or books. The children themselves also spoke noticeably less.
The results also showed that parents spoke fewer words while playing with traditional toys than while reading books. While reading, adults used more concepts corresponding to the subject of the book than when playing with puzzles and cubes.
According to the authors of the project, he confirmed the differences between the three types of parent-child play activity. Reading books ranks first in terms of benefits for children, traditional toys are second, and electronic toys are third.
Conclusions for parents
“These results suggest that you should not get carried away buying electronic toys that are advertised as educational and are often quite expensive,” the authors of the study conclude. “Our findings are complemented by a large body of evidence supporting the potential benefits of reading books to very young children. In addition, playing with traditional toys can be just as effective for developing speech and communication skills as reading books, so this type of activity should definitely be preferred.”
In other words, if parents do not want to raise a small technological “Mowgli”, you should not replace live developing communication with a child by playing with electronic toys, even the most expensive and “educational” ones.