Too Much Tech Could Affect Kids' Speech and Hearing, Association Says

Thinking of pacifying your baby with bright, shiny screens? Better think again, says the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA). Those mesmerizing screens could be interfering with your baby’s hearing and speaking.

This message is part of ASHA’s effort this month, which is Better Hearing and Speech Month, to raise public awareness about communication disorders and the importance of early intervention.

The effort includes a new public service ad: A baby is heard giggling and cooing in a crib. Soft, tinkling mobile music is playing. But what’s that dangling over the baby’s head? A mobile made out of smartphones, with cartoons shining on their spinning screens.

This simple sentence appears near the end of the 17-second ad (seen below): “Too much tech and too little talk could delay communication development.”

The ad comes at a time when hearing and speech disorders are on the rise among children and adolescents. Speech problems among U.S. children increased dramatically in the decade between 2001 and 2011, rising 63%, according to a new study published in Pediatrics in August. Hearing disorders jumped nearly 16% during the same period.

It also comes at a moment when more and more babies and toddlers are being exposed to increasing amounts of screen time, just as their most rapid period of brain development and language development is taking place.

Many recent studies have reported sobering news when it comes to young children, even babies, and screen time today—particularly time spent looking at mobile devices. A new survey released this month from ASHA is no exception. 

As part of ASHA's Identify the Signs public service campaign, the poll asked 1,000 U.S. parents of kids ages 8 and under about their children’s tech use. More than two-thirds of the parents’ 2-year-olds (68%) use tablets, more than half (59%) use smartphones, and 44% use video game consoles.

Even among 1-year-olds, device use was surprisingly high, with 59% using tablets, 53% using smartphones, and 47% using video consoles. The numbers didn’t even drop too significantly for the under-1-year set.

In a USA Today column titled “Babies Don’t Need Smartphones,” ASHA president Judith L. Page warns that overuse of technology can translate into an underuse of the very things babies and toddlers need to develop their vocabulary and communication skills: Listening, talking, reading and interacting with other real, live human beings.

Page, who is a speech language pathologist, writes, “[When] the consumption of technology eclipses or begins to diminish social interactions with very young children, we have a problem—and a big one. The image of a group of toddlers sitting apart, all engaged in their devices rather than playing together, isn’t some far-off notion.”

An image from ASHA's Identify the Signs public service campaign.

As a society, we’ve become far too used to seeing groups of college-aged students, high school students, and even middle-schoolers sitting amongst each other, completely entranced by their phones, not looking up, not taking in their surroundings, and not talking to one another. But toddlers?

I say this all the time, and Page says it even better: “Anyone who has traveled by subway, walked through an airport or, really, seen people in any public setting knows that adults live in their devices: ear buds in, heads down. The difference, though, is that we grew up without these devices—and that’s an important distinction.”

Yes. Whatever potential risks or pitfalls we might face today when it comes to our own mobile tech use as adults, we did not face these as toddlers—and thank goodness. Even today’s teenagers, who are certainly a pretty “plugged in" group, weren’t swiping mobile screens as babies. I’ve heard parents of teenagers today express relief that their kids didn’t start off in a world filled with apps and online games for babies, that they at least got to experience a few years of growing up before they could carry the Internet around in their pockets.

We are still in “uncharted waters,” as Page writes, when it comes to having real information about what exactly this increased tech use might be doing to such tiny developing brains, including to the development of the ability to communicate.

“However,” Page writes, “we do know that nothing substitutes for human interaction when it comes to speech and language development—not even technology.” (She links to this study on brain mechanisms in early language acquisition.)

“Hearing-wise, technology can do outright damage,” Page continues, “if it is allowed to repeatedly emit unsafe sound levels close to the ear.”

She notes that the World Health Organization (WHO) recently reported that 1.1 billion teenagers and young adults worldwide are at risk of losing their hearing due to the “unsafe use” of audio devices, including smartphones. WHO found that nearly half of 12- to 35-year-olds in middle- and high-income countries are exposing their ears to unsafe levels of sound when they use personal audio devices.

Babies and headphones? Be sure to check the sound levels.

Parents today are definitely concerned about this, the new ASHA poll found: 72% of those surveyed agreed that loud noise from technology might lead to hearing loss in their kids.

And they’re taking precautions: Across parents of all age groups (from birth to age 8), 85% or more monitor the volume level of their kids' devices that have earphones, headphones or ear buds, and more than 80% monitor the length of time their kids spend listening to them—which is all good news.

In general, the ASHA poll found that parents of young kids do allow a good deal of screen time, across the board. Some additional key findings:

• Fifty-five percent of kids 8 and under use technology devices on car trips; 22% use them in restaurants.
• About one in four 2-year-olds (24%) use technology devices at the dinner table. By age 8, this percentage nearly doubles, to 45%.
• Parents of 2-year-olds think 35 minutes a day is an appropriate amount of “tech screen time”—which includes video games, smartphones, tablets and computers, but not TV.
• Two-year-olds spend a mean of 28 minutes per day using earphones, headphones or ear buds. By age 8, this jumps to 67 minutes per day.
• The mean age parents think kids should first be allowed to use smartphones is 8.5 years old. (The mean age for appropriate first use of Internet-enabled tablets is 7.7.)
• By age 8, a majority of kids (58%) would rather have technology present than not present when spending time with a family member or friend.
• Fifty-seven percent of parents of 1-year-olds and 59% of parents of 2-year-olds say they rely on technology to help their children learn “outside of a school setting.”

But parents are also concerned about the misuse and overuse of tech:

• More than three-quarters (77%) agree with the statement “Misuse of today’s technology can be harmful to young children.”
• More than half (55%) voiced concern that misuse of technology might be harming their children’s hearing; 52% said it might be limiting their children’s speech and language skills.
• Fifty-nine percent worry that misuse of technology may cause behavior problems, and 52% worry it may cause academic problems.
• Fifty-five percent worry about using technology too much to keep their children entertained. Thirty-five percent report that they often rely on technology to prevent behavior problems or tantrums by their children. (Among parents of 8-year-olds, nearly half—48%—report doing this.)
• Many (52%) are concerned that technology is negatively impacting the quality of their conversations with their children, and that they are having fewer conversations than they would like because of technology (54% report this).

It’s completely understandable today that conversations with kids might be suffering due to so much time spent on screens—by parents and kids alike. As parents today, we own more screens than any generation of parents who came before us could have ever even imagined. The more they become an important part of our own daily lives, the easier it becomes to hand them over to our children—or, I should say, the harder it becomes not to.

It makes sense that today’s children—even our very littlest ones—have more exposure to screens than children ever have before. 

But that doesn’t mean we have to accept it.

We can serve our children best by remembering what ASHA president Page stresses to us: That there is no substitute for helping young children develop communication skills through real, organic conversations. That the less time babies and toddlers spend conversing, the less opportunity they have to develop strong speech and language skills. 

And that it’s talking and reading together—not swiping and gaping at screens, alone—that will build the communication skills our kids will need and use for a lifetime.