“Facetime doesn’t count”: Video chat as an exception to media restrictions for infants and toddlers
Introduction
Many children in the United States are geographically separated from their parents or grandparents today [1], [2], [3], [4]. Strong family ties are known to be critical for healthy child development [5], and modern communication technologies have become an important resource for families developing these bonds at a distance. Today, a military parent deployed abroad can still interact and play with his or her infant at home. Indeed, families report using video chat services like Skype and FaceTime to help their children develop and maintain relationships with parents who are separated from them by work [6], divorce [7], immigration [8], or military deployment [9]. Furthermore, it is also used with other remote family members, such as grandparents [10], and can provide a supportive forum for discussions of family issues and a way for relatives to view the child’s developmental progress [11].
The accessibility of video chat technologies is important for the whole family, but it may be especially critical for children under 7 years of age, as they tend to have difficulty using audio-only media like telephones to communicate [12]. Furthermore, because the use of audio-only telephones requires verbal and cognitive skills that they have not yet acquired, infants and toddlers under 2 years of age are especially unlikely to be able to use such media effectively. Video chat may offer an alternative, but little is known about its use by such young children or its potential to support relationships among this age group. Instead, most existing research has focused on older children (e.g. [6]) or on the learning potential afforded by socially interactive screens (e.g. [13]). Preliminary studies have shown that toddlers remain content for longer when they have access to a parent via video chat than when they are completely alone [14] or when they have access to a parent via audio-only telephone [15]. However, there is also evidence that two-dimensional media can be difficult for babies to process (see [16], for review). While some studies with older children (24-30 months) suggest that the social contingency cues of video chat may ameliorate this problem [13], it is still unknown whether video chat technologies are useful for children under two years. Furthermore, even as the prevalence of smartphone ownership among families with young children has grown in the past 5 years–75% of families with children between 0 and 8 years of age own smartphones or some other mobile touchscreen device [17]–and has made video chatting more accessible, there is still very little data on the frequency of video chat usage among these young children.
While video chat, as a visual medium, has the potential to offer a more effective communication alternative for toddlers, parents may face a dilemma when deciding whether to use this technology to support their children’s long-distance relationships. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) currently recommends that children under 2 years of age avoid screen media exposure entirely, due to the absence of evidence supporting its benefits and the potential for negative effects [18]. While pediatricians and developmental experts have been calling for changes to this recommendation [19], [20] and the AAP itself has announced plans to temper the suggestion [21], strict recommendations like these that do not discriminate between types of screen usage may lead parents of infants and toddlers to avoid using video chat, simply because it is a type of media exposure.
Given the AAP’s recommendation on the one hand, and the potential benefits of video chat on the other, are families actually using this highly accessible technology with their toddlers at home? Will parents see video chat as a worthwhile exception to current media usage guidelines for their babies, and if so, what can be done to support positive interactions with this technology by its youngest users? While nationally representative surveys report that those infants and toddlers who are exposed to screens spend an average of at least 1.5 h per day with them [22], none of these have yet collected data on video chat usage among such young children. This survey study aims to establish a preliminary understanding of the frequency of video chat usage among children under two years of age.
Section snippets
Procedure and participants
An online survey was distributed to families in the DC metro area who had at least one child between the ages of 6 and 24 months. These families were recruited at community events, through parenting listservs, flyers, and through word of mouth. Responses from 183 eligible families were collected, and participants were predominantly middle to upper-class (median household income between $100,000 and $150,000 per year), well-educated (79% master’s degree or higher), Caucasian (93% White) mothers
Video chat and phone use
Families in this sample reported using video chat with their infants often. In fact, 85% of survey participants reported that their infant had ever used it, while 60% used it at least several times a month and 37% used it regularly at least once a week. Thus, most of these infants and toddlers use video chat, and those who do use it do so quite often. Video chat usage also remained equally high across both the younger and older infants (84% of 6- to 16-month-olds, and 88% of 17- to
Discussion
This survey demonstrates that the use of video chat among infants and toddlers under two is remarkably common, even among those whose parents know about the AAP’s media usage guidelines and otherwise restrict media usage for their toddlers. The AAP is currently updating its guidelines for parents due to the rapidly changing media environment; it should consider this parental perspective regarding video chat as it updates its recommendations regarding infant media exposure. The new guidelines
Conclusions
Video chat surfaced in this study as a substantial and previously-unreported source of media exposure for children under 2 years of age. There are three key findings from this timely survey. First, video chat is widely used by children under 2 years and is categorized more positively by parents than other types of screen media; it is even seen by some as an exception to otherwise strict media limitations. Second, infants and toddlers use video chat most often to maintain connections with family
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2021, Infant Behavior and DevelopmentCitation Excerpt :Another limitation was that the purpose of screen use (e.g., education, pacifying, seeing loved ones) and parental co-viewing was not assessed. While video chatting may facilitate more positive social engagement due to higher parental involvement (McClure et al., 2015), using screens to “manage” emotional outbursts may hinder EF (Coyne et al., 2021). However, the cross-sectional nature of our analyses prevents us from establishing the direction of causality, thus it is unclear whether bi-directional relationships are in play.
Infant media use: A harm reduction approach
2021, Infant Behavior and DevelopmentCitation Excerpt :Research summarized in this article, as well the harm reduction and bioecological approaches, inform example recommendations provided throughout this paper for families, pediatric providers, and future guidelines developers (see Table 1 for a summary). As AAP guidelines for infant screen media use are evaluated and updated, families with infants should be included in recommendation development to determine guideline feasibility (e.g. Marlatt’s “bottom-up” approach; McClure et al., 2015). Current restrictive guidelines may be difficult to follow in our screen media-saturated culture and may not be achievable by all families.
Tantrums, toddlers and technology: Temperament, media emotion regulation, and problematic media use in early childhood
2021, Computers in Human BehaviorCitation Excerpt :Young children use media for a variety of reasons, and effects differ based on the context and content of the media environment (Barr & Linebarger, 2016). For example, video chatting (e.g. FaceTime and Zoom) allows families to connect and build relationships with grandparents, extended relatives, or physically absent parents, despite physical distance (McClure & Barr, 2016; McClure et al., 2015). Adults are responsive to infants’ needs while video-chatting, helping develop positive social-emotional skills (McClure et al., 2017).
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Present address: Science of Learning Institute, Johns Hopkins University, 3400 N. Charles Street, Krieger Hall Room 167, Baltimore, MD, 21218, USA.