The American Academy of Pediatrics this fall has released new guidelines, having new policies for both the use of electronic and social media for infants and small children and for older children and adolescents. The feeling overall is that we're realizing now that screen time and electronic media are not going away and are playing a bigger role in families.
The real feeling is that, for children still less than two years of age, the use of electronic and social media should still be very limited and always supervised by parents. There is some literature that says that children over 18 months of age can benefit from electronic forms of media such as FaceTime and Skyping, for example when they're visiting with a family member perhaps who's out of town, or a parent who is overseas serving in the military. That's felt to be a valuable tool that is beneficial with them, in other words they get that.
The real feeling is that children learn much better from reading or playing sort of hands on games and interacting directly with real people in the real world than they do from passively responding to video games and to even learning applications on social media, tablets, cell phones.
Along with that, we really feel that use of electronic media and electronic devices should not be our new pacifier for the new millennium. We see that often. We worry that children whose parents use the cell phone or a tablet to show movies or play music to pacify them or soothe them may not learn how to self-regulate on their own without such devices.
