Screen Time Without the Guilt: Making Educational Apps Work for Your Toddler

*Collaborative Post

That’s the question on the mind of nearly all parents raising children in the 21st century. We’ve heard that it’s always bad. We’ve heard that it can sometimes be helpful.

We’ve even heard some reports that initial screen time worries were largely overstated. What do all of these things have in common? Not very much, and that’s the problem.

In this article, we take a look at what parents should know about screen time, particularly in determining when it is appropriate for toddlers.

What Are the Risks of Screen Time for Toddlers?

First of all, we will admit there are a lot of them. Excessive screen time for children aged 1 to 3 is highly correlated with developmental delays, including struggles with communication and language.

That’s a pretty big red flag for parents, particularly those who know how important early verbal and communication skills are for general developmental trajectories. It’s not just that kids with delayed language development might pick up words a little slower than their peers. It’s that these delays can follow them into school and eventually interfere with their literacy.

It’s a very serious consideration. Overstimulation also just changes the way that our brains work. If your child is constantly being exposed to fast-paced media, it can overdevelop their visual cortex.

If you don’t know what that means, it’s okay. The takeaway is that kids who are being constantly overstimulated may struggle with emotional regulation, as well as their general ability to communicate and process information.

There’s also a generalized lifestyle risk. Kids who are spending a significant amount of their recreation time with screens are not doing higher-value activities like playing.

Play, particularly active, imaginative play, helps kids to regulate their weight and fitness, while also encouraging the development of their imagination.

Is Any Amount of Screen Time Safe?

The general doctor’s recommendation is to avoid screen time completely for children who are under two years old. The only generally acceptable form is considered video chats.

Even this is actually more of a quality-of-life consideration designed to allow families to communicate more effectively. The thinking is that most two-year-olds won’t be spending a significant enough amount of time on FaceTime to hinder their development.

As children get a little older, it is considered acceptable to cautiously introduce them to screen time. Caution, of course, is the operative phrase.

One hour of high-quality screen time has been introduced as a reasonable threshold for kids who are consuming educational content. There are apps for toddlers that are designed to facilitate early literacy skills and introduce children to valuable concepts.

Choosing Educational Apps for Your Children

If you’re going to use educational apps as a resource for your toddler, it’s important to choose wisely. Games that prioritize language and literacy skills can actually give your child a head start on preschool concepts that will make it easier for them to learn their letters and develop a working understanding of sight words.

Science and mathematical apps can also be valuable, though it’s harder to find ones that are geared towards two-year-olds. Apps do offer a multi-sensory learning experience, which is good. They also possibly even acclimate the child to tools they will use a little later on at school.

That said, it’s important to understand that there is not always a perfect skill transfer when it comes to communicating educational concepts from an app into real life. You can choose great programs and limit your child’s screen time effectively and still find no noticeable benefit.

Evaluating Your Reasons for Screen Time

As you determine whether or not screen time is an appropriate fit for your child, it helps to consider what’s motivating your decision. Keeping the child occupied while you work on dishes or other tasks around the house might feel like a reasonable justification. Maybe it is. That’s not really anyone else’s place to determine except for yours.

That said, you can always take the “eat this, not that” approach. Screen time could keep them occupied, but so could drawing with a crayon, paging through a book, or singing a song. There are a lot of ways to keep a child busy. Parents have been doing it since, well, the dawn of time. Apps are brand new by comparison.

One good reason to consider introducing tablet apps into your child’s educational routine is as a way of diversifying their exposure to educational content. The best way to prepare a child for school probably is not through applications. However, if you’re mixing apps in with books and hands-on activities, that could be a more impactful strategy.

Go Slow and Figure Things Out

When in doubt, wait it out. You probably don’t want to start by super-saturating your child with screen time. Give them access to an app for 10 to 15 minutes at a time and see how that goes.

If they’re genuinely learning from the experience, it might be worth scaling the process up gradually. If it’s doing more harm than good, you have your answer. Screen time just isn’t a good fit for them, and that’s perfectly valid.

Remember that research absolutely still supports an attitude of caution when concerning screen time with children. Total exclusion doesn’t have to be the stance that you take in your household, but it’s a good idea to be careful. The habits they develop now may follow them throughout their adolescence.

*This is a collaborative post. For further information please refer to my disclosure page.