Quality time with your child, spending facetime with each other, can positively affect your child\’s life. However, due to the busy mentality of many Americans nowadays, parents are choosing to forsake one-on-one time with their child and substituting it with modern technology, including television and computers. While this approach may seem to work well temporarily–to quiet a fussy baby or a toddler in the middle of his terrible two\’s–the longterm negative effects of relying on technology to raise your baby have become very apparent.
This might be surprising but most babies start watching TV at the age of 4 months! It\’s difficult to believe that so much has changed in the past few decades. No longer are parents spending time playing with building blocks or reading to their children, but instead, thanks to society\’s obsession with money and multitasking, parents are relying more and more on the television and the computer as virtual babysitters.
Children can learn a lot from watching the adults around them. As such, television is not an appropriate substitute for facetime with your child. According to research, television with a lot of stimulation (many rapid edits, zooms, and pans) can actually LIMIT your child\’s attention span in the future. These rapid scene shifts causes children to expect real life to mirror the images on television; when reality fails to measure up, children are less focused and less attentional. Parents, note that just one hour of TV a day before the age of 3 make children 10% more likely to develop attentional problems in the future. This may explain the recent rise in attention disorders like ADHD in children.
This facetime is most pertinent for young children. Babies have a critical period for which full language acquisition is possible. What this means is that during that time, babies are able to listen and learn new languages (including sign language!) without developing an accent. As a result, sign language (for hearing and deaf children) should be introduced early in a baby’s life. Not only will it allow your baby to develop more synapses in his or her brain—thereby creating the foundation for better learning—sign language also allows a family to spend the necessary one-on-one quality time together that many babies crave.
For more information: http://seattlemamadoc.seattlechildrens.org/what-does-tv-do-to-my-kids-brain/