Smartphone and tablet usage linked to speech delay in toddlers, new study finds

Screen time on handheld devices has been linked to speech delay in babies, a recent study has warned. Toddlers, under two years, are beginning to talk later if they become accustomed to smartphones or tablets.

Parents have complained about their children beginning to talk later and looking at the patterns, researchers have linked speech delay to the amount of time that the toddlers were spending on handheld devices.

The study, presented at this year’s Pediatric Academic Societies Meeting, looked at 894 children, aged 6 months to 2 years, included in TARGet Kids!, a practice-based research network in Toronto between 2011 and 2015. By their 18-month check-ups, 20% of these toddlers have already used smartphones or devices. And this practices is become more and more popular, specialists say, as parents are reporting that their youngsters sometimes play for minutes on end with the handheld devices.

And when they screened the children with a tool developed to underline speech delay, scientists were able to draw a direct line between the amount of time that the toddlers spent on smartphones and tablets and the risk of delayed speech. For each 30-minute increase in handheld screen time, researchers found a 49 percent increased risk of expressive speech delay.

There have been clues that devices could interfere with speech development, but this is the first study that proves the correlation between screen time and toddlers beginning to talk later in life.

“Handheld devices are everywhere these days,” said Dr. Catherine Birken, the study’s principal investigator and a staff paediatrician and scientist at The Hospital for Sick Children. “While new paediatric guidelines suggest limiting screen time for babies and toddlers, we believe that the use of smartphones and tablets with young children has become quite common. This is the first study to report an association between handheld screen time and increased risk of expressive language delay.”

But screen time was found to have no impact on the development of other types of communication, like body language or on social interactions.

The study did not prove a direct cause and effect relationship and experts say that there is a need for further in-depth study on how exactly screen time alters speech. To better understand this link, scientists are wondering what types of activities are the toddlers engaged with when using tablets and smartphones and the amount and the type interaction between parents and toddlers should also be taken into account.

Even before this study, the American Academy of Pediatrics has recommended no screen time, other than video-chatting with family, for children younger than 18 months. The same restrictions were recommended for older children but the AAP revised their ban and said that parents should use high quality programs and watch them together with their youngsters in order to explain children what they were actually seeing on the screens.

The concern is that as there are more and more screen devices, the number of children using them and the amount of time they spend on smartphones and tables is rising. Common Sense Media has reported back in 2013 that for American children aged zero to eight, the amount of times spent on devices has tripled form 2011 to 2013, reaching 15 minutes a day. Also, in 2013, 38% of toddlers under the age of two, have already used a mobile device.

And when it comes to what children were doing on mobile devices, 63% of them were playing games while a half were using apps. 47% were watching videos, while 38% were watching movies.