While the exact causes remain a matter of speculation, it is thought that excessive electronic device screen time among the very young and possibly the lingering impact of the coronavirus-related lockdowns of 2020 and reduced in-person socialisation are likely key factors driving the trend.

Developmental delays

Maria Riestra-Quintero, president of the Florida Head Start Association, who spoke at an Aug. 9 conference in Miami, talked to the Florida Catholic, Miami's archdiocesan news outlet, about her concerns.

"We have seen an increase recently in children with all sorts of developmental delays — mainly in speech and language, and we think it has to do with use of tablets in the early years," she said.

She added that 90 percent of the brain "develops in the first five years of life and with a (electronic device) tablet a child doesn't have a feedback loop."

"If we are having a conversation I am asking you questions, you are responding to me then that is what we call a feedback loop and that develops receptive and expressive language," said Riestra-Quintero.

She is the assistant director of early childhood programs in the Head Start/Early Head Start Division of Miami-Dade County's Community Action and Human Services Department.

She refers to the screen time usage guidelines set forth by the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, which has detailed recommendations on managing a child's screen time according to age.

Screen time includes interaction with smartphones, tablets, gaming consoles, TVs and computers.

How much screen time?

The Academy recommends:

Until 18 months of age limit screen use to video chatting along with an adult (for example, with a parent who is out of town).

Between 18 and 24 months screen time should be limited to watching educational programming with a caregiver.

For children 2-5, limit noneducational screen time to about one hour per weekday and three hours on the weekend days.

On average, children ages 8-12 in the United States spend four to six hours a day watching or using screens, and teens spend up to 9 hours.

Too much screen time can be harmful

While screens can entertain, teach and keep children occupied, too much use may lead to problems, according to the academy.

The results of overuse can include sleep problems, poor academic performance, poor reading habits, less social time, reduced outdoor and physical activity, obesity, mood problems, and poor self-esteem and body image issues.

"If you use a tablet there is receptive language but not expressive language, so you cannot express yourself," Riestra-Quintero said.

"You are listening, you are taking in, but when it's time to express your feelings, your emotions and to be able to communicate we are seeing that many students are coming in with a greater gap since COVID," she said. Read more

• Tom Tracy writes for OSV News from Florida.

The research was published on Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association (Jama) Pediatrics.

It tracked 220 Australian families over two years to measure the relationship between family screen use and children's language environment.

Families recorded all the audio around their child using advanced speech recognition technology over a 16-hour period on an average day at home.

They repeated this process every six months between the ages of 12 and 36 months.

The lead researcher was Dr Mary Brushe from the Telethon Kids Institute.

"The technology we use is essentially like a Fitbit, but instead of counting the number of steps, this device counts the number of words spoken by, to and around the child," she said.

The device also picked up electronic noise, which the researchers analysed to calculate screen time.

The researchers found young children's exposure to screens including TVs and phones interfered with their language opportunities, with the association most pronounced at three years of age.

For every extra minute of screen time, the three-year-olds in the study were hearing seven fewer words, speaking five fewer words themselves and engaging in one less conversation.

The study found the average three-year-old in the study was exposed to two hours and 52 minutes of screen time a day.

Researchers estimated this led to those children being exposed to 1,139 fewer adult words, 843 fewer child words and 194 fewer conversations.

Because the study couldn't capture parents' silent phone use, including reading emails, texting or quietly scrolling through websites or social media, Brushe said they might have underestimated how much screen usage is affecting children.

A language-rich home environment was critical in supporting infants and toddlers' language development, Brushe said.

While some educational children's shows were designed to help children's language skills, very young kids in the age group of the study could struggle to translate television shows into their own life, she said.

This study did not differentiate between whether children were watching high- or low-quality screen content.

Previous research in the area had relied on parents self-reporting their own and their child's screen time, and only studied short periods of time.

"To our knowledge, no studies conducted since the rapid uptake of mobile phones and tablets have actually tracked children's screen time and their early language experiences over an extended period of time," Brushe said. Read more

• Natasha May is a health reporter for The Guardian newspaper.

A recent report suggests that women's social networks positively affect her child's cognitive development, says Dr John Shaver from the University of Otago.

The analysis also suggests that religious women have stronger support networks.

Shaver says that previous studies have found that sibling number is negatively related to a child's cognitive and physiological development.

It is also negatively related to a child's socioeconomic success in adulthood.

This happens because parents have less time, and fewer resources to invest in their development.

"The expectation, based on these findings, would be that due to differences in family sizes, children born to religious parents would exhibit poorer developmental outcomes than children born to secular parents," Shaver says.

The report's authors tested the hypothesis that religious cooperation extends to alloparenting (investment in children by people other than the child's parents), that higher levels of social support for religious mothers were associated with their fertility and their children's development.

Shaver says while the findings only support some hypotheses, they were mostly consistent with the idea that religions in modern environments support cooperative breeding strategies.

Women who receive help from members of their congregation have higher fertility, and this aid, as well as more general forms of social support, were both associated with improved child cognitive development.

"By positively influencing social support, religion in the UK may help some women have more children, without sacrificing the success of these children."

Shaver is the lead author of the report Church attendance and alloparenting: An analysis of fertility, social support, and child development among English mothers, published this month in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, the world's oldest English language journal.

Source

• otago.ac.nz
• newstalkzb.co.nz
• voxy.co.nz
• Image: teara.govt.nz

In a new study, researchers found that religion can be a mixed blessing for children as they get older.

John Bartkowski, professor of sociology at The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), Xiaohe Xu, professor of sociology at UTSA and chair of the Department of Sociology, and Stephen Bartkowski, from the Office of Institutional Research and Effectiveness Services at the Alamo Colleges District, recently published an article called, "Mixed Blessing: The Beneficial and Detrimental Effects of Religion on Child Development among Third-Graders" in the journal Religions.

The team analyzed data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS)-Kindergarten Cohort to complete the study.

They examined the effects of parents' religious attendance and how the religious environment in the household (frequency of parent-child religious discussions and spousal conflicts over religion) influenced a nationally representative sample of third-graders.

They reviewed the children's psychological adjustment, interpersonal skills, problem behaviors, and performance on standardized tests (reading, math, and science).

They found that third-graders' psychological adjustment and social competence were positively correlated with various religious factors.

However, students' performance on reading, math, and science tests were negatively associated with several forms of parental religiosity.

The findings suggest that parental religiosity is a mixed blessing that produces significant gains in social psychological development among third-graders while potentially undermining academic performance, particularly in math and science.

"Religion emphasizes moral codes designed to instill values such as self-control and social competence," said Bartkowski.

"Religious groups' prioritization of these soft skills may come at the expense of academic performance, which is generally diminished for youngsters raised in religious homes when compared with their non-religious peers."

This research builds upon a previous study conducted by Bartkowski and colleagues.

Published in 2008, that study was the earliest to use national data to analyze the impact religion has on child development.

That study found that religion was associated with enhanced psychological adjustment and social competence among primary school-age children (kindergartners).

Bartkowski also discovered that religious solidarity among couples and communication between parent and child were linked to positive development characteristics while religious conflict among spouses was connected to negative outcomes.

Bartkowski said there are many ways to pursue well-rounded development, and religion is only one avenue.

"If it takes a village to raise a child, religion occupies an important place in that village. But it certainly doesn't have a corner on fostering positive developmental trajectories for children.

"In fact, religion may be best paired with other community resources such as academically oriented school clubs and activities," he concluded. Continue reading

• Image: ETSA

For the child—and the adult who knows there is still a child in all of us—fairy tales reveal truths about ourselves and the world.

As psychologist Bruno Bettelheim stated in his extraordinary study, The Uses of Enchantment (1976), "the fantastical, sometimes cruel, but always deeply significant narrative strands of the classic fairy tales can aid in the greatest human task, that of finding meaning for one's life."

Children who are familiar with fairy tales understand that these stories speak to them in the language of symbols—not the reality of everyday life.

Children know that the fairy stories are not "real," yet the real events in their lives become important through the symbolic meaning that is attached to them.

They know that the events described in these stories happened "once upon a time," in a "world far from here."

The old castles, the magical fairies, and the enchanted forests existed in a unique fairy-tale time—a time described in the opening lines of the Brothers Grimm's "The Frog King" as a time that was long, long ago, "when wishing still helped."

Yet these stories are still important.

In fact, they are probably more important than ever as we try to find meaning in our increasingly chaotic lives, and as increasing numbers of children are no longer raised within a community in which Church provides a source of meaning.

Fairy tales speak directly to the child at a time when the child's major challenge is to bring some order to the inner chaos of his or her mind.

These stories help children understand themselves better—a necessary condition for achieving some congruence between their perceptions and the external world. Continue reading

Source

• Anne Hendershott in The Catholic World Report

Anne Hendershott is professor of sociology and Director of the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at Franciscan University of Steubenville.