- Speech delay can influence a child’s ability to conceptualise words or define their emotions
A new study found children who spent more time with hand-held screens were more likely to exhibit a delay in expressive speech.
Hand-held screens might delay a child’s ability to form words, based on new research being presented this week at the annual Paediatric Academic Societies Meeting in San Francisco. This preliminary study is the first to show how mobile devices impact speech development in children, raising a question that fills the minds of many parents: How much time should my child spend on a mobile device?
But for parents who see mobile devices as an education tool, don’t immediately lock away your smartphone or tablet. Here’s what you should know about the risk. Studies on media usage and child development are notoriously difficult to conduct. Doctors can’t exactly split up a bunch of babies and say, “you kids spend a lot of time with your iPads, while the rest of you don’t. Let’s see what happens.”
Birken and her team assessed each child with the Infant-Toddler Checklist — a screening tool that looks for signs of delayed communication development. “It isn’t a definitive diagnosis,” Birken said, but it does assess whether a child is at-risk and needs to be referred for further evaluation. Birken emphasised that the findings, at this stage, don’t prove cause and effect. That would require a clinical trial where children are randomly selected and tracked throughout childhood. But this study highlights what could be a life-altering trend for children exposed to too much hand-held screen time because of the value of expressive speech.
“When kids can’t express themselves they get really frustrated,” said Jenny Radesky, a University of Michigan developmental paediatrician who wasn’t involved in the study. “They are more likely to act out more or to use their bodies to try to communicate or use attention-seeking behaviours.”
In the short term, an expressive speech delay can influence a child’s ability to conceptualise words or define their emotions. Though some children who are behind at 18 months or 24 months can eventually catch up, over time, these language delays can impede literacy skills in grade school. “Early language delays have been linked with later academic problems or not finishing high school,” Radesky said.