Schwartz notes that practically any other form of play-playing outside, drawing or painting, playing dress-up, building things, playing with pots and pans while mom or dad make dinner-is more likely to stimulate and socialize young children, because they are acting and thinking, touching and feeling and manipulating things, experimenting, drawing conclusions, observing cause and effect.Īnd you can add to the list talking to parents in the car on the way to school.īy the way, in case you think kids who are driven to school are the only ones at risk of being plopped in front of a video screen, one morning last spring, on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan, I saw a mom briskly pushing a preschooler in a stroller that had a video screen mounted in the child’s line of sight. And does it need to be said that kids shouldn’t be watching anything while they’re supposed to be doing homework? “I wouldn’t advise watching such shows on the way to school or any time they’re expected to pay attention and learn,” the lead author of the study told the AP.Įxcuse me, but the takeaway here should be that preschoolers-and older kids as well-shouldn’t be plugged into video of any kind on the way to school. The study claimed that four-year-olds who watched 9 minutes of SpongeBob performed worse on executive function tests than peers who watched 9 minutes of Caillou, a slower-paced, more realistic PBS cartoon about a preschool-aged boy, and a peer group that spent 9 minutes drawing.
Preschool age children are modeling what they see, so characters that interact the way real people do, whether they’re cartoons or live-action, can contribute to their development, she adds.īut parents agonizing over which kind of video is best for toddlers may be getting anxious about the wrong thing. “The important thing,” she said, “is seeing real-life scenarios being played out, whether it’s on the playground or on TV or in the kitchen corner at school or with blocks as symbols of real life.” Susan Schwartz, a learning and educational specialist, doesn’t think pace is the issue when it comes to what’s developmentally appropriate for preschoolers.
“These children’s brains were actually tired from all of the stimulation.” “Not all TV is the same,” said another researcher at the University of Washington, who reviewed the study. The lead author of that study was suggesting that fast-paced programs featuring unrealistic scenarios may over-stimulate the brain, making it harder to trigger executive function skills. Is it credible that watching a particular show, like the often-blamed hyperactive cartoon SpongeBob SquarePants-could have a negative effect on preschoolers? It’s a question that worries many parents and even became the subject of a 2011 study in Pediatrics.
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