Toddlers Can't Learn From Watching Videos On Screen, They Need Parents To Engage & Teach Them

Toddlers these days love spending their time in front of a screen, whether it is a TV (or a smart TV) a tablet or a smartphone.

And while parents might feel that the colourful educational videos that kids love to watch are helping them learn numbers and nursery rhymes, it isn't really the case.

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A recent research conducted by Vanderbilt University (reported by The Hechinger Report) tested this notion by trying to teach and interact with toddlers from a video chat. The test involved 176 children from age 24 months to 30 months. The kids were presented an object they called 'modi'. Researchers had established four different conditions where the kids had to learn its name as well as this specific object in the bin.

Researchers discovered that the kids were able to learn the name of the object and complete the task, only when someone was in-person and actively interacting with the child. What's surprising is that the 30-month-olds also easily learned the name even without the engagement of the adult.

However, younger toddlers failed to learn the name or complete the task even after speakers on video chat interacted with them in real-time. The video chat without the speaker engaging didn't show any positive results either.

According to Georgene Troseth, an associate professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University says that toddlers often cannot learn from screens, even if the video is interactive since they cannot understand the fact that the person in the video is real. She feels around the age of three is when kids can truly understand this correlation. She states, "They have figured out a picture can represent something real or an idea in your head...That's part of this idea of looking at a screen and realizing there's a person there who's teaching you."

She also feels that parents shouldn't really be investing in apps to help their kids learn. She says, "We just don't have good evidence for very young children that you should put your money and attention toward buying the app because somehow it's going to make them get into the Harvard of preschool."

Representative Image: Rawpixel

She also feels that during car journeys the parent's interactions with the kids will help them learn a lot more than some video or app. "The learning will happen more with the kid while driving and talking to the kid."

But this doesn't mean video chats are truly meaningless. According to Troseth, they can be crucial in developing emotional bonds between the child and the parent, if they're not around all the time. However, the key here too is the presence of someone in the room to 'make the connection'. This is when a child learns the best.