by Alix Tonsgard
There is no doubt that parents, caregivers, daycare providers, and early childhood educators are under a tremendous amount of pressure to provide our youngest children with the highest quality of experiences in order to prepare them for the future. Naturally, our modern instincts lead us to look to what we perceive to be trusted sources for how best to support the development of our infants and toddlers even when doing something as seemingly simple as selecting toys. The key word here is “perceive.”
While perusing the toy aisle, parents tend to pick up items packaged with educational buzz words that make them feel that they will indeed be enhancing their child’s development. Often, the toys being selected today are electronics. Not only are these toys packaged to make one believe they are educational, they are appealing because when parents have a million things that need to get done in a day, the toys can provide the distraction needed to be able to check things off the list while the little one is occupied.
However, there is a plethora of research that suggests that electronic toys for infants and toddlers that employ flashing lights, music, or any type of electronic effect have been found to reduce the amount of language exposure, as well as the quality of the type of language used by parents during play. A study conducted by Anna V. Sosa, PhD et al. at Northern Arizona University found that children who played with their parents with electronic toys were exposed to fewer adult words, conversational turns, parental responses overall, and content-specific words.
Furthermore, such children were found to vocalize less while playing with the electronic toys than while “reading” books. This vocal play that takes place during interactions in the early years is enormously important in language development. The researchers found that overall, parents produced the most words, including content-specific words, during play with books. This finding supports the perspective that the best educational tools are the important adults in the child’s life, books, and simple materials such as blocks.
To read the full blog, visit dupagechildren.org/blog.
Alix Tonsgard is an early learning specialist at the DuPage Children’s Museum.
