The silent cost of screen-time – a look at the impact on language development

By Nika Dehghan, mother and Senior Speech & Language Therapist, for Smartphone Free Childhood Gibraltar

When I was talking to my husband about writing this article, my eavesdropping five-year-old pipes up “but mummy you use your phone ALL the time?!”

There we have it, straight from my most honest critic! So, I’m not standing on a pedestal here to tell everyone they need to stop because clearly, I’m not following that advice myself.

Smartphones are an inescapable and somewhat essential part of our daily lives, however, you may well have seen in the very recent UK and local media that there is some clear research emerging on the negative impact of screen time on our young children, so as parents we do need to be informed and aware.

The World Health Organisation quite clearly recommends strictly no screen time for children before two years old. Yet, as a mother of two children under the age of five, I can say that even with the best of intentions I have not managed to adhere to this for my 20-month-old youngest.

It’s not easy, especially if you have older children in the house who are allowed screen-time!

Even if they are not looking at a smart device, more often than not, we are. But why is that an issue? Well, it means we have lost countless potential opportunities for important parent-child interaction moments.

They’ve actually coined a term for it, technoference, where smartphone use disrupts and reduces our responsiveness to our children.

So, what has been discovered to make the British Education Secretary suddenly speak up and create the UK’s first official guidance on screentime for under-fives (watch this space – to be published in April)?

A recent review looked at the association between children’s language ability and screen use, and it found that lower language skills were associated with more hours spent using screens (even if it was just background television).

There was also a relationship between child language and the age at which children started using screens – children who started using screens at an earlier age were more likely to have poorer language skills than those who started using screens later.

We cannot say for sure that it is the screen use which is impacting children’s language development, rather than any other factor, but it should certainly be enough to make us think twice.
Now I don’t want this piece to be all doom and gloom, I believe in being realistic and finding a balance.

The research has also looked a lot at the impact of ‘co-viewing’ – when parents/carers join their children for screen time – this is one of the factors associated with increased language skills.

As a Speech & Language Therapist this is the bit I relate most strongly to because, although there is potential benefit in educational content, long-standing research tells us that watching anything in a one-way viewing transaction will not support language learning.

However, if you sit with your child and pick up on the vocabulary used in that Paw Patrol scene and then use it later when you’re at the park, you can help build meaningful, functional context to those words.

So, what’s my take-home message? I’m not going to say we need to go cold turkey with smart technology for our children, but I am going to suggest we need to change how we approach and use screentime, particularly with our toddlers.

A phone-free childhood is not about rejecting technology. Many children use tablets for learning and for communication support, and video calls can keep families close.

The problem is personal, portable, always-on media that quietly creeps into the moments where development normally happens: the chat on the walk home, the shared story before bed, the messy pretend play that builds imagination.

Language does not grow in silence. It grows through back-and-forth exchange, a child points, you respond, they respond back. Those tiny interactions build vocabulary, turn-taking and attention.

When a screen replaces a human, or even sits in the background, the opportunity for those exchanges shrinks. So where do we start with what might feel like an impossible change?

1. Use screens together and talk about what you’re watching
2. Balance screen time with face-to-face time
3. Choose programmes and games that are educational and appropriate for your child’s age or stage of development
4. Use smartphones to take pictures of activities throughout the day, and then use the pictures as prompts to talk about what you did together
5. Make video calls together to family or friends
6. Set boundaries around screen use and create a visual timetable to help younger children understand how and when screen time fits into their daily routine

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