We all remember the pre-Covid times, when people could just go to restaurants and order food. I’ll always remember seeing parents pass down their iPads or iPhones to “shut their toddlers up”. These toddlers, with digital devices in their hands, are no longer crying. Parents, on the other hand, are no longer “embarrassed” in a public and social setting where there are many onlookers at the restaurant.
Looking and observing from afar, I’ve always “judged” these parents. Why did they just throw a piece of technology at their children? Isn’t that bad? I see my older cousin, who has a daughter, do that to her child whenever we have gatherings. My niece would just laugh at the same “stupid” Daddy Shark and Baby Shark video. But am I in the wrong for judging so hard and being so critical on parents?
According to Karen Wohlwend (2017), this article called “Toddlers, Touchscreens, and Tablet Technologies: Learning “Concepts Beyond Print” seems to have something to say about it. Specifically, she has something positive to say about this, particularly talking about toddlers being able to recognize icons, knowing where to tap “to make an invisible icon visible”.
O.K., maybe I am being too quick to judgement. The majority of children under the age of 8 have their own digital devices and they are already handling these touchscreens where they know to use their fingers to tap on the screen to “make things happen”. What Wohlwend (2017) stated that really stood out to me is that the children are trained at a very young age to be “multimodal, interactive, and flexible” (p. 2). I mean, digital technology really manifests the reality that everything is at our fingertips. This may not be so when I was growing up in the 90s, but this is certainly true for children born after 2010. Everything is at their fingertips — what a different childhood they are living!
Digital devices provide critical reading images, according to Peggy Albers et al. (2017). Children are learning to read the world and understanding the world through a whole lot more visualizations. In other word, children have access to digital images and many images in text that help children “make sense of both fiction and nonfiction texts” and also learn about the “cultural norms” (Albers et al., 2017, p. 225). This visual data exposure becomes easier for children.
What Wohlwend (2017) and Albers et al. (2017) presents is that good can come out of toddlers playing with digital tablets. I feel like I am a little more convinced about this, but not quite completely.
So, maybe I’ll give my toddler a tablet. Not to shut my child up, but to actually give them early exposure of a vast amount of information that is at the tip of their fingers. That actually sounds pretty exciting, but I am sure that my worries are still completely justifiable. It is good that they are exposed to, interacting with, and building digital literacy practices, but how far is too far? How early is too early?
References
Albers, P., Vasquez, V. M., & Harste, J. C. (2017). Critically reading image in digital spaces and digital times. In K. A. Mills, A. Stornaiuolo, A. Smith, & J. Z. Pandya (Eds.), Handbook of writing, literacies, and education in digital cultures (pp. 223–234). Routledge.
Wohlwend, K. E. (2016). Toddlers and touchscreens: Learning ‘Concepts Beyond Print” with tablet technologies. In R. J. Meyer & K. F. Whitmore (Eds.), Reclaiming early literacy (pp. 1–14). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.