The_Guardian_-_2016-12-29

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Technology
Nuance needed in debate about technology’s
role in children’s development
‘Some screen-based material may be enjoyed and valued by both parents and children,’ writes Cary
Bazalgette. Photograph: Alamy
Letters
Wednesday 28 December 2016 18.34 GMT Last modified on Wednesday 28 December 2016
22.00 GMT
The signatories to the letter on children’s lifestyles (Screen-based lifestyle harms children’s health,
26 December) make the usual error – compounded by your selective headline – of lumping an
enormous variety of cultural experience into one category: “screen-based”, which is then labelled as
merely “technology”. This makes about as much sense as lumping all printed matter together under the
heading of “paper-based technology”. We know that’s a silly idea because we know that printed
matter includes a vast range of cultural products, from novels to cereal packets. Screen-based content
is just as diverse. Instead of wringing our hands over the long-established fact that children start to
access this content during their first year of life, could we start to give some informed attention to
how children begin to “learn about the culture they are born into” (to quote one of the signatories to
the letter) and consider the possibility that some screen-based material may be enjoyed and valued by
both parents and children, and may make a serious contribution to children’s social and emotional
development?
Cary Bazalgette
Researcher on children and moving-image media, UCL Institute of Education
• The harmful nature of the screen was revealed in an experiment by neuroscientist Patricia Kuhl
quoted in the National Geographic in January 2015. She taught Mandarin sounds to two groups of
babies, with one group through personal interaction and with the other through video, and was
astonished to find that while the first group learned extremely well, the second learned nothing
whatsoever. The reason is that there was a subtle energetic exchange in the interaction between
children and carer, whereas machines cannot register or transmit energy other than their own