[gentle music]

- Welcome to University Place Presents. I'm Norman Gilliland. For several generations now, many a parent has been tempted to plop their child down in front of some kind of video in order to keep them quiet. But what sort of video? That may have changed over the years, and so might the content. And the question is, one of the questions is, what are the children getting out of it, and how young does a child get anything out of video of one kind or another? With me is Heather Kirkorian, professor of family studies and human development at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and welcome to University Place Presents.

- Thanks, Norman; it's good to be here with you.

- I have to ask a personal question first. What did you watch as a child, and what did you get out of it?

- Oh, gosh. I promise this is not because I'm here with you today, but I watched a lot of PBS when I was growing up. Mister Rogers, Sesame Street. 

- Norman: Great. And you remember what from those programs?

- I remember a lot of very specific moments. One thing in particular I remember is Fred Rogers on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood talking to us as the kid audience very directly about what it means to be on TV and that he's there with us, but not really in person, and I can't reach out and take his popcorn. I remember that scene very vividly and use it in teaching a lot.

- So he told you about the illusion right away?

- Right away. I was four or five years old at the time, yep.

- This would've been television, as we've said, but of course, now there are all kinds of other forms of video. And in your many studies, what kind of forms of video have you looked at?

- Yeah, so I study kids using different types of digital media. Video's the most common thing I study, but I've also looked at toddlers and touchscreens, if they use touchscreen apps, e-books, or just simple books that are presented on a tablet computer. - What age group did you study? How far back, how young? - My youngest research is with infants around one year old, about 12 months old, and then up to 5 and a half or so. 

- How do you determine anything about what a one-year-old is going to get out of any kind of video?

- It's a great question. One of my favorite tools for the youngest kids is eye tracking. So we use specialized cameras that can monitor where kids are looking when they're watching video, and that can tell us quite a bit about whether they're tracking the action and the story or just looking at things that are moving around a lot.

- And what do you deduce from those studies of one-year-olds?

- From one-year-olds, they look at things that move around a lot. So they're not typically tracking what the characters are talking about, for example. They'll look at whatever is most salient on the screen, what's moving, where there's a lot of visual contrast, like bright against dark, and they're less likely to follow the action or anticipate what's coming next.

- Norman: And color?

- Yeah, so color contrast in particular. So not that they're looking at a particular color like red versus blue, but if there's contrast, like one sharp color against another, that tends to draw their attention.

- And do you have a sense now as to, let's say, the proportions of the media use and what the children are listening to?

- Yeah, definitely. So research from Common Sense Media tells us that even though kids are shifting a lot of their screen time to mobile devices, so they're using tablet computers and smartphones much more than watching TV on a household TV set. Even though those devices have changed, most of what they're doing is still watching TV and video content. So they're watching it on a mobile device instead of a household TV set to an increasing degree. But the vast majority, something like three-fourths of what they're watching, is still video rather than apps, or games, or other things.

- And in case you need a visual representation of those proportions, we have it right here in a pie chart format for you. Give you some idea of the amount of time children spend watching or the proportions of the media that they watch and the time they invest in each one. What kind of differences do you see? I mean, if you're saying the content is essentially the same, what kind of, what behavioral differences do you see coming out of the use of these various media?

- Yeah, so in some ways, video viewing is video viewing, and it doesn't really matter what device you're using, but there are some differences. The content itself has changed a lot over time. For example, pace is much faster now than it was several decades ago. So some things have changed a lot. The delivery mode has changed a lot, so the youngest kids are spending much more time on streaming media. So streaming video platforms like YouTube, much more than broadcast TV. So more on-demand streaming content. The way advertising comes into play has changed a lot. So all sorts of things have changed a lot, even though the act of watching video might be the same.

- Well, you have a couple of threads there that I'd like to pull. One is the advertising. How has that changed over time when it comes to children in particular?

- Yeah, well, I think one way that it's changed is when it was just broadcast TV when I was growing up, it might be ad-free or it might have very predictable ad blocks that are targeted to children. Now we're seeing more ads that interrupt content or ads that might be directed at older adults, like advertisements for cars you might, parents might purchase, for example, showing up in streaming media channels for young kids.

- So it's kind of a one-room schoolhouse in a way. Everybody's getting the same thing, no matter how old or young they may be. 

- Mm-hmm, that's right.

- And we have another chart here too that we can't resist looking at, and that has this bar graph giving us the idea of viewing at certain ages. And is that just because of what you just said, Heather, that a one-year-old is not going to get a lot out of it and therefore the programming is gonna be pitched higher?

- Heather: Yeah, so screen time definitely increases with age, and that's due to a lot of reasons. Part of it is that as kids get older, they ask for screen time more, so they're requesting it or turning it on themselves a lot more. And some of it is that messaging has got out there. The American Academy of Pediatrics has discouraged screen time for kids under two for many years now, and parents are increasingly aware of that recommendation, so they're less likely to have a lot of screen time for those younger kids.

- And the other question I had has to do with just the speed, or, let's say, the brevity of the shots, the pacing of these programs. If you've ever just kind of accidentally, let's say, gone by somebody's house where their screen was very prominent. You're not hearing the audio, you're just seeing how fast those shots change. What kind of measurement do you see in that change, and is it related, do you think, to attention span or what?

- Yeah, so those shots, so those shots you're talking about have gotten shorter over time. So the average length of a shot in movies and TV shows has shortened over time since when I was a kid. We find that that, we used to think that that had an impact on things like attention span. That if kids are watching really fast-paced TV shows, for example, it will shorten attention span in the real world. There's not a lot of evidence to hold that up. The pace itself doesn't seem to matter very much in terms of attention span. What does seem to matter a bit is the content. So if kids are watching sort of fantastical, goofy content, then they might have less inhibitory control after watching that than if it's very calm and natural content.

- It does seem that a lot of, or I'm hypothesizing here or maybe basing it on personal experience as having watched certainly my share of video of one kind or the other over the years. It seems that a lot of what you get out of any kind of a video has a lot to do with what you bring to it, what you respond to, what you're interested in.

- Yep, that's exactly right. So one of the biggest things that research is focusing on now is thinking about individual child differences. So what is their knowledge of media? What experience do they have with media? What are their cognitive skills like? What language skills do they bring? A whole host of things, and that tends to moderate what impact screen time has on them. So are they likely to learn from it or not? Are they likely to have a lot of fussiness and tantrums when screens are taken away or not? Those things differ a lot from one child to the next.

- So in a sense, some children do their own winnowing and sifting when they're watching stuff.

- Yeah.

- For better or worse that stuff may be, they're kind of sorting through it and responding in a way that reflects their interest, their curiosity, and their temperament too.

- That's exactly right. Both in terms of what they want to watch or what they want to play and what they remember from it.

- And what part, getting back to kind of the one-room school concept but bringing it home, what effect does the environment that a child watches this programming in have to do in terms of the context, who's around when they watch, and what is their response?

- That's a great question. This was understudied for a long time, but the research is moving in this direction pretty rapidly, thinking about the context in which that media use happens. So kids don't use media in a bubble. They don't watch TV in a bubble. That's within a family context. And it turns out, it makes a big difference if kids are watching videos by themselves versus with a caregiver, for example. They'll learn a lot more from it if they're interacting with someone else while they watch, and they're less likely to have some of the potentially more harmful effects, like being frightened by something scary they see in TV, for example. Similarly, the larger context. So the effects of media on child development seem to be greater for kids in lower-income homes, for example, both the positive and negative effects.

- One of the negative effects you've already mentioned, Heather, and that is withdrawal. And how would a caregiver of any kind, whether it's a parent or a professional outside the home, deal with that in terms of knowing when to make it available, this video in whatever form it may be, and knowing how to withdraw it without a riot.

- Right. One of the most common questions I get from parents is, "If I use screens, how do I turn them off without a meltdown?" That's one of the most common questions I get from parents. And that's a real concern for parents, and for some kids more than others. In terms of when to use screens, there are different kinds of guidance around when, in terms of the time of day or at what age.

So the American Academy of Pediatrics has specific guidelines about ages, and how much, and when. They discourage screen use for everybody, you and I, you and me included, in the hour before we go to bed at night, so in terms of time of day. And in terms of when to withdraw, the American Academy of Pediatrics has guidance for how much time per day as well. I tend to focus less on the time per day as opposed to what kids are doing and what they might be missing out on if they're on screens.

- We have a representation of that here too. Give you a little bit of a cheat sheet for any kind of caregiver who is considering using video in any form to interact, let's say, with a child. And how do we interpret these Cs, these five Cs?

- Heather: Yes, the five Cs. It's a really useful framework for thinking about kids and screens at different ages, and they have tailored advice for kids at different ages, if folks are interested in looking that up. But this comes from the American Academy of Pediatrics, again, the Center of Excellence on Social Media and Youth Mental Health. They have guidance for kids, from infants all the way up through teens. And the five Cs sort of tell us what does the research say about screen time and kids? What should parents really be thinking about when they decide whether to use media, what kinds of media to use, when, and how?

So thinking about the child, which we've talked about. Individual children respond differently to screens, and parents can adapt their rules around screen time to those individual needs of children. For example, whether they can turn it off without a meltdown. That's a big one. The content they're watching, we've talked about a bit. That matters hugely. The impact of screen time on kids hugely depends on the content they're watching. 

Calm refers to whether media is used as a calming device and whether kids have other ways to calm themselves down other than using screens. Crowding out refers to what kids might be losing out on if they're using screens. We wanna make sure they're getting enough sleep, for example. And communication. So families are encouraged to communicate early and often with kids about screens.

- Well, I remember scenes from childhood in which a parent or a grandparent just came into a room and said, "Go outside and play." And actually, I think by then, we were all ready for it anyway.

- That's right.

- So sometimes, it's, I guess, getting a cue that you're sort of hoping for anyway would help out.

- Yep, that's right. And I think in terms of turning off screens, it can be really helpful to think about what kids are in the middle of, and letting them finish their thought, I think, is really helpful in taking it away.

- Well, if you're talking about a video game, that's probably paramount, isn't it?

- Right, getting to a goal or an endpoint, a natural endpoint in the game. Turning it off in the middle of a challenge that you're trying to get over can be really difficult.

- Well, I've seen that kind of reaction for technical breakdowns, I think, causing it among high school students, for that matter. You know, extreme distress over getting to a certain level in a video game and then it suddenly cuts off.

- Yep, that's exactly right. It's really frustrating. I feel that way as an adult sometimes.

- Well, we'll talk about your video gaming maybe a little later, but in the meantime, interaction, or the interplay between a child's temperament and their video dependency, let's say.

- Yeah, absolutely. So there's some research now really focused on what the literature calls problematic media use in young children. And there's some evidence of this as early as four years old. It might emerge even sooner, but the youngest kids I've seen in the research are four-year-olds. And this is characterized by certain behavior traits that might suggest problematic media use. So that might be a preoccupation with media, like asking constantly even after you've been told no to turn the TV on, for example. Sneaking media. So older kids might sneak a device into the bedroom at night, for example, so they can watch videos at night. And having meltdowns when told to turn the TV off or turn the game off.

- Well, yes, and I, again, not to put any, too much of a burden on today's generations, but when I was a kid, we actually, after bedtime, sneaked down the street to watch a certain show on a neighbor's TV. And since I don't remember the repercussions, we must have gotten away with it. 

- [laughing] Right.

- But speaking of bedtime, you mentioned earlier, Heather, this idea that the experts recommend against any kind of screen time within an hour of going to bed?

- That's right.

- You wanna apply that to children as well as adults?

- Yeah, I think that guidance applies. So the American Academy of Pediatrics focuses on kids, but I've seen similar guidance for adults too, and I know a lot of adults in my life who try to follow that rule for themselves for better sleep.

- And what is the, what is the effect? What is the problem with that?

- Yeah, there's pretty good evidence, at least in adults, that using screens, especially mobile devices, which we hold close to our faces late at night before bed, can disrupt sleep. There are a lot of ideas for why that might be the case, and they're probably all a little bit true. So some folks have studied blue light, just the nature of light that comes from the screens. Others have focused on time displacement. So if you're on your screen late at night, you might stay up a little bit later than you otherwise would have and get less sleep. And then the quality of sleep can also be disrupted by the content of what we're doing. So if you're having, reading upsetting news or thinking about a work problem or doing those kinds of things late at night, that's going to disrupt sleep as well.

- Maybe even if you're just reading an e-book.

- Right, so the content will matter a lot, the activity, so if you're using it to listen to mindfulness meditations before going to bed, right, to help you fall asleep, that's going to be really different. Or reading a book is going to be really different. Blue light can still be a concern if that's a mechanism. So turning the screen down or using night mode or dark mode can be helpful there.

- Let's get into techniques then that might be used. And I know you have a video for this too that has techniques for weaning children off of videos when it's deemed necessary.

- Yeah, exactly. So because this is one of the most common questions I get from parents, over time, I've gathered tips that researchers have suggested that parents can use to help make that transition easier. So for some kids who are really dysregulated, that might need a bit more guidance if kids just have emotional or behavioral dysregulation. But for most kids, it's really about habit-forming, making things predictable, setting clear guidance. So if there are clear rules and routines around when screens can be used and when they need to be turned off, that's really helpful for kids, as it is for anything, for bedtime routines or any other routine. Keeping it consistent and predictable is really important for young kids, so they know what's coming and they know what's expected. 

Rewarding kids for having good self-regulation is really helpful too. So if kids give back the iPad, for example, when you say screen time's over, that can be really helpful for kids learning that that's what they should be doing. "Yes, I gave it over nicely, I didn't have a meltdown." So those kinds of things can be helpful. And then there are ways that we can use the media itself to help us out. So choosing media that has natural endpoints, avoiding things like streaming media with an endless "up next" playlist, and having a, kind of time boxing the video so that it's a constrained playlist with maybe two episodes of something. 

- Or yes, probably not watching a two-and-a-half-hour movie.

- Right, exactly. So if you wanna keep to 20 or 30 minutes of screen time, choosing something that's that amount of time is helpful. Yep.

- That could apply also to, to parent generation if they're getting within an hour or two of bedtime.

- That's exactly right. It's harder for all of us now. You know, we can watch an entire season of something on Netflix or something before we go to bed. Yeah, I mean, we all have to sort of set those rules for ourselves.

- And if we're talking about commercials then, how does that play into really, do we see, obviously I would think the advertisers would see an effect when they're advertising to children. Do we see negative effects from that advertising, though?

- That's a good question. I think it depends on how you define negative. So I completely agree with you. A lot of the research on this is proprietary corporate research, so we can assume it wouldn't be a multibillion-dollar industry if it wasn't effective. - True. - So they certainly know that it works. And there's other academic research too that suggests it works. Whether you think convincing kids to want a product they wouldn't have otherwise wanted is a negative outcome. I think reasonable people might disagree about whether that's negative. I have my own opinions about it I'll keep to myself, but certainly, it has an effect that it's sort of kids are more likely to want certain brands over others if they see advertising for those brands. 

- Oh, boy, yeah, that's the, certainly the oldest principle in the world in terms of media of any kind, whether it was pre-TV in the days of radio. You hear a lot of broadcasting very brand-oriented in the commercials and, of course, promising, in a kind of a figurative way, superpowers if you have your cereal, you know, your Sugar Pops or whatever it might be in the morning.

- That's exactly right. And the industry has some self-regulatory bodies now that help keep each other in check a little bit and try to keep things ethical. So some of the concerns that have been raised in the past that are less of a concern now are using, for example, cartoon-like figures to sell products that aren't for kids like cigarettes, for example, or alcohol. So that has been an issue in the past, and it increased kids' interest in having those things because there's a cool-looking cartoon character on that package. And that's regulated a bit more now.

- Makes me ask about animation in general. Of course, that's a very, very old and venerable way of entertaining children. I mean, Fantasia, Walt Disney had that figured out, you know, most of a century ago now. However, when you get to something like The Simpsons, that's also animated.

- That's right.

- And so how are those guidelines developed to separate, or even should they develop in a way that would separate a five-year-old, a seven-year-old from watching The Simpsons, or are there others that are even further pushing the limits?

- Yeah, absolutely. And this is a cue that kids use very early on when they detect, "Hey, is this for me or not?" Animation is one of the quickest cues they learn. Animated is for me. At least that's been the case for decades. And that might change over time as we get more and more animated content for teens and adults. But they use that cue early on to decide if it's for them, and that can lead them down a path of choosing something they think might be intended for them that very much is not. I think parent monitoring is obviously a good way to try to minimize that a bit. And then also, there's stuff that the industry can do to make sure they're not either intentionally or unintentionally marketing that information to young kids. 

- Is there a way to, like if you hand a young child some kind of video device, I'll say something handheld, for example, a way to have content control over that?

- There is; you mean in the device itself?

- Yes.

- Like to sort of force it? It depends on the-- It's really about the apps that one is using. So, for example, YouTube has some pretty easy features, like using YouTube Kids as opposed to the parent YouTube. The main YouTube, I should say, that parents are likely to use. But that is just one step. What I prefer to recommend to parents is having an opt-in content solution. So rather than saying, "It's on YouTube Kids, it's gonna be fine." If parents have the time and energy to do it, curate their own playlist of things their kid can watch and set up what I call a walled garden so kids can watch the videos that I, as the parent, have selected to put into this playlist. That's all they have access to because there's stuff that can get through the filters in moderation on YouTube Kids, for example.

- Speaking of content guidelines, are these PBS guidelines that we're seeing here?

- Heather: They're from the organization Zero to Three. They worked with researcher Dr. Rachel Barr to make these what they call screen sense. These are the E-AIMS, so you can see on the screen what that stands for. And these are based on research by a number of developmental psychologists focusing on what works for young kids in general for learning, how do they learn well in the real world, and what does it take to apply that to the digital realm? So this is basically their attempt at translating that research on how kids learn well in the real world to make it work on screens as well.

- We haven't really gotten into what kids of various age groups, other than the one-year-olds, actually get out of video in one form or another. So let's take it all the way up to two-year-olds for starters. What do they see, what do they think, and what do they feel when they're watching a video?

- Yeah, so even the youngest kids will look at screens, but we can tell a lot from different ways of studying kids' attention to screens, what are they actually getting out of it? And the research for a long time suggested it wasn't 'til about two and a half years old or so that kids made sense of what we would think of as television, like an edited program that has different scenes and tells a story over time. So it's not until about two-and-a-half years old that kids start to show some evidence of understanding that kind of information and being able to turn that into something meaningful in the real world. But it takes a long time for kids to become as good as an adult at doing that.

- If we take something that you wouldn't want your child to see, but for whatever reason sees it anyway, let's say a two-year-old, three-year-old, how would they react to violence on TV?

- Yeah, that's a great question. 

So there are lots of studies on this, and we all have personal anecdotes of something that scared us on TV too. And some kids are more sensitive to that than others. This is one of those. The first of the five Cs is child. This is one of the ways parents know their child best. Is their child someone who's really sensitive to that kind of image and will likely be really scared and have trouble sleeping at night or be disturbed during the day by that content. Parents know best how their child's likely to respond. Some kids are more sensitive to that than others, but we all have anecdotes of being scared by something we saw on video. There are things parents can do to help minimize that. 

And the best strategies differ by the child age. So for really young kids, it's mostly useful to have physical comfort. So, you know, physical contact with a caregiver that they know and love, or a stuffed animal, or a blanket, or something they know and love, that kind of physical comfort. The other good strategy for young kids is just avoidance. Not avoidance of the conversation, but avoidance of the content. So trying to prevent kids from seeing content that's likely to scare them. Older kids might be better able to talk about it and understand that's just fake, it's on TV, or that happened really far away, it's not going to happen here. Those kinds of conversations can be more effective for older kids than younger ones.
- How about TV as just purely a distraction factor? Children are in the room, you have people having a conversation, maybe even somebody making music, and you have a TV on.

- Yeah, this is really common in that early image we had of how much time kids spend with screens is a very much an underestimate if we consider secondhand TV exposure, background TV exposure.

- Sounds like you're talking about smoking now. 

- Exactly.

- It's analogous, isn't it?

- It's a good analogy, exactly. So you're exposed to it, but you're not doing it. So most studies about kids' screen time is asking about when kids watch TV, but they're exposed to a lot more than what they are personally watching. So that's really common, and there's good research now on what impact that has on their attention and play and those kinds of things. So trying to minimize that background distraction can be helpful for young kids.

- And a challenge when you have several kids, for whatever reason, all in the same close quarters.

- That's exactly right. There's a good reason, a good explanation for why younger siblings watch a lot more TV than older siblings do.

- I mean, it's interesting to be in a room with, like, say, a one-year-old, a four-year-old, and a seven-year-old, and you bring the one-year-old into the room and gravitates toward whatever's on that screen, whatever they're getting out of it. And you say, Heather, it's not all that much, but it's something that's light, and colorful, and active, and they might just kind of gaze at it, but it does seem to just draw their attention like a magnet.

- Yep, that's exactly right. I mean, it's movement, it's sound, it's lots of change happening very quickly. All of those things just tap into the brainstem and make us look, even if we don't want to. And that's true for everybody, but it's especially true for young kids who have less control over their attention, yeah.

- Is this a representation of a way of using or the ways that media regulate themselves? Is that what we're seeing in this graph?

- Heather: Yeah, this graph is showing what we call regulatory media use. So that's a long-winded way of saying using media to calm a child down, regulate their emotions and behavior. So this comes down to one of those Cs called calm. So that's using media to calm children down when children are upset, or stressed, or hyper. And so we find that that kind of regulatory media use peaks during the preschool years. 

So you can see on the screen, like, two to five years old, we see that is the most common age when this kind of thing happens, which is no surprise because that's when behavioral dysregulation is at its highest, emotion dysregulation is at its highest, and kids are still figuring out how to use their words to explain what they need.

- I'm tempted to use that phrase that we would apply to other things that people become dependent upon. You find children with an addictive personality who fall afoul of video media?

- Yeah, this is the phrase I used earlier, problematic media use is the more common phrase in the literature. A lot of people who study this don't like the addiction word. With young kids, they don't think it's the right word to use, but I think it's a similar class of behavior. So letting it crowd out other activities that kids need, right? That's the same kind of behavior we might see with addiction in adulthood. Does it prevent you from getting the things you need to be healthy and happy? So is it crowding out other things? Do children have emotion dysregulation so they get really upset and have meltdowns around screen time, those kinds of things. Some might consider those precursors to problematic media use. Whether it's truly an addiction, smarter people than me on that topic even debate it still, so it's hard to know where we'll end up.

- Do you go so far, Heather, as to recommend guidelines for how much video of various kinds a child should have in a day?

- Yeah, the pediatrician experts have concrete guidance around, like, no more than an hour per day for preschoolers, none for kids under two. 

I think a lot more about what kids are doing in the day and is screen time crowding out the other things they do? So I use charts like the one you see about thinking about your child's day as a zero-sum amount of time. What kinds of things do you want your child to have in that day? We definitely want them to get enough sleep. We definitely—

- Norman: Sleep is a good one.

- Heather: That's a huge one. And for the youngest kids, that's, you know, half their hours of the day might be in sleep. Are they losing out on high-quality sleep because of screen time? If so, we might need to address the screen time. The same goes for high-quality parent-child interaction, physical activity, outdoor time, time to think and be creative. I wanna make sure kids get good amounts of time in the day to do all of those things. And if they're doing that, screen time is probably not a huge concern for that child as long as the content isn't harmful, like scary or violent.

- Well, as a researcher, how do you feel about the family sitting down to dinner together and watching TV instead of doing it the old-fashioned way and sitting around the dining room table?

- Yeah, meal times is one of the number-one recommended screen-free zones for pediatricians. 

- Is it?

- Right, so they recommend identifying screen-free zones, and they think meal times is one of those we should try to make screen-free. And the reason for that is because it's one of those times where kids and parents come together and talk about their day and open up about things, so it can be one of those protected spaces. So I think for me, it's, the other reasons for meal times is that we, research also shows we eat a lot more when we're watching TV while eating than not watching TV.

- You're not even aware of it, are you?

- Exactly, you're sort of mindless eating, if you will. So there are several reasons to not have screens around you while you're having meals. That said, if parents find other times in the day to have distraction-free, screen-free interactions, to me, that's a good goal to have, even if it's not during mealtime.

- And then there's physical activity. You know, back in the day, for a lot of even suburban neighborhoods, you could get out, you could, you know, ride your bike around the street, you could play games that nobody's ever heard of anymore, and all that would take place outside. But if you're in a really, an urban environment or some other situation where those outside activities are not readily available except maybe, you know, at school for a period of time, what's the solution to that, do you think?

- Yeah, I think both outdoor time and physical activity, the two tend to go hand in hand, although they don't have to. I think this is a good example of wanting to be aware of screen time potentially crowding out those things. The context matters a lot, as you said. So the environment kids are in might be more conducive to outdoor play, physical play, and physical activity, more so for some kids than others. I think this is a place where we can think of technology being a potential solution too.

So especially during peak pandemic, there were a lot of families who used different kinds of videos and games to get physical activity when they couldn't go to the gym, for example. So there are some popular examples of games and videos that get kids to dance along with someone on the screen, for instance. So that's one of my favorite forms of physical activity, actually, playing video games where you dance along with a character.

- Otherwise, it's your thumbs that are getting all the physical activity.

- Right, exactly. That's exactly right.

- Do you play video games, Heather?

- I do; some, a few. 

I have a select set that I play, yeah.

- And do you have criteria for those?

- I do. I have a pretty narrow interest set when it comes to video games, yeah. Yep, I like adventure and puzzle-solving games quite a bit.

- Well, okay. And the puzzle solving, well, those would be physical too, or they also can be text-oriented.

- They tend to be visual and spatial, but using my thumbs and not my body, yeah.

- As far as the various alternatives to video and all that that we've talked about, you have one more element here that I'd like to talk about in terms of maybe a two-edged sword, and that is the role of creativity interacting with video. Is it a damper, or is it a stimulant?

- Yeah, that's a good question. There's not a huge amount of research on this compared to some other areas, to be honest. I think if we look at just minutes per day, screen time minutes per day tends to be associated with lower creativity. But this is where content comes into play quite a bit too. So there are some shows, apps, and games that are designed to allow kids to be creative or encourage creative thinking, and they can be effective. So content that's explicitly designed to help kids be creative or create space for creativity, like finger painting apps and those kinds of things. Those can encourage creativity and inspire kids to think more creatively, but they have to be designed very intentionally to do that.

- Well, and some efforts to do that on TV do go way back. There used to be a show when I was a small child. I won't name names because it would date me, but there was a show that invited the children to complete a drawing, and in order to do this, they would put, they would have to send off for this for 25 cents or something, a plastic screen on top of the TV screen, and they would draw, you know, to complete whatever animal or robot or whatever it might be on the screen. The only problem being children being impatient didn't always wait to get the screen, and they would just go up and draw right on top of the TV screen.

[laughs]

So I guess again, parental guidance is necessary, but it's interesting how far back that attempt to stimulate creativity goes in video media. 

- That's exactly right. And some of the shows I loved the most as a kid, both PBS shows were art shows, right? We can all think of famous examples of artists on TV that we might watch do art. And there was an artist on TV when I was a kid who was doing drawing lessons for kids. And I loved it. I sat there with my paper and followed along, and was really interested in illustration as a kid because of that.

- And as we get into having all these various kinds of media available to us, do you have any kind of a breakdown, and we've talked about overall video time in a day, but when you have TV, and you have streaming on TV, and you have a iPad, and you have a cell phone, all of which are pretty manipulative or can be manipulated by the user, it's not like you're just watching or not watching a program or a channel. Do you have any way of, like, breaking that down or do you just say overall video use in the course of a day that you would recommend?

- Yeah, so the most common recommendations are total minutes of screen time. I would say the biggest breakdown we see in recommendations is video chat being pulled out into its own animal. So video chat is seen as something really different and probably mostly positive for young kids if they're using video chat to connect with relatives, or family and friends, or things like that. So that's usually pulled out and not included in screen time recommendations. 

But otherwise, e-books, digital games, apps, TV, video, they're all tend to be lumped together into screen time guidance. For me, it depends on the activity itself. I think video chat's different, of course, but an app or a game is really different from watching video. I care a lot more about the content than the activity or device itself. - Give us some idea about video chats since not everybody will be familiar with it.

- Yeah, so folks use different kinds of tools for this now, but the most common ones are using Zoom or FaceTime on iDevices, so using some kind of app that allows you to connect with someone in real time the way you and I are talking right now, but through our screens.

- What age would you recommend, and this gets a little bit more into the sociological aspect maybe, but what age would you recommend a child have access to video chat where they can talk under the blanket or whatever with the person next door or down the street or in some other country now, I suppose.

- Yeah, for me, if it's for things like connecting with family, for example. Folks that are in the child's life who might not be physically present. I don't have a minimum age for that. And this is assuming they're doing it with supervision and someone who can help them understand what's happening and engage. So really young babies aren't going to get a whole lot out of that. But we do know that they can learn to recognize people, for example. So when they see that person in real life, in 3D for the first time, they might be quicker to recognize that person and be more comfortable with them if they've had that video chat experience.

- And the facility with these devices is almost startling at times when you talk about small children. I mean, I did see a two-year-old one time basing his track on an icon, on the basis of just that icon, actually called his father on a cell phone.

- Mm-hmm.

- And are we seeing more of that?

- Yep. Yeah, kids are great learners, right? They learn to use devices quickly, and that's true for screens and for a whole bunch of devices. Kids are just really great at figuring out how things go. So even really young kids, toddlers, are going to be really quick at learning how to make a screen device go, how to make it do something interesting that might not be a desired outcome for the parents in the room. So it's important that we help supervise that and help them know what's appropriate and what's not, and take away access to things we don't want them to do, like buying things on the parents' credit card.

- I've heard stories of that too. Yes, racking up some serious bills because you're just pushing the icon.

- Indeed, yep.

- In this research that you're doing, what are you thinking is the frontier?

- Like the next big thing? Yeah, so a couple of things, I think. We have a lot more to learn about individual differences in kids. How are individual kids affected, and what are some warning signs for kids that might be at greater risk of harm versus kids who would really benefit from certain types of learning games, for example. We know far too little, I think, about individual differences in this world. That's something that's getting a lot more attention right now. 

Another big frontier I think that's just starting to happen is thinking about differences that happen within individual kids or families over time. So we tend to think of screen time as if it's fixed and static, like two hours a day, and that's what we do. But in fact, some days we use more screens than others. Some days we watch some kinds of content than others. We might use video chat one day, watch movies another day. We don't really know a lot about what it looks like from day to day and how one day might be more positive than another for an individual family or person.

- And we have seen, speaking of differences, of course, in older minors, teenagers, let's say, and even, I suppose, people in their twenties who get a false concept of body image or desirable body image from Facebook or any number of other media.

- Yep, that's exactly right. And a big part of that is content. So being exposed to certain types of content that encourage thinness or radical eating or things like this. So the kinds of content folks are exposed to can be really harmful. And we know those things can fluctuate day to day, and they might feel more positive some days than others. Knowing what predicts positive days and bad days, days that make us feel better about ourselves versus worse about ourselves, we know far too little about that at this point.

- In terms of planning what your child should watch, you also have a plan that you provide here, and let's have a look at that and see how that might be implemented.

- Heather: Yeah, I think one of the easiest things parents can do is have a plan about what the rules are going to be in their house and working with kids to figure out what that might be, especially for older kids who are old enough to think it through. Because some of the more disruptive media use in our lives is when it's reactive as opposed to planned. Like someone's having a meltdown, quick, stop the meltdown, and rather than thinking through, "How can I help this child soothe themselves and learn how to self-regulate?" So having a plan in advance for how to tackle both emotion disruptions in the day as well as when and how to use media is helpful for everybody. It helps parents make decisions, it helps kids know what to expect so they don't have meltdowns about things. So having a plan is helpful. And there are different strategies for doing that and different tools for doing that. 

There are some good online tools for helping families make a plan based on the age of their kids. So I think some of that is about helping kids learn how to manage their own screen time. So what we may call scaffolding their own self-regulation around screen time. How do we help teach kids to learn when they've had enough, when they need a break? Some of that is being a good role model, saying, "Oh, I've had too much screen time today, I'm gonna take a break." So we can model that.

- Oh, yes, that's true that some children, some individuals going through life have more self-discipline than others. 

- Yep, that's exactly right. I think you're right. That's true for adults too, right? Some of us are better at self-regulation. Having a plan, even if we don't always follow that plan, always helps. We don't have to always follow it.

- Yes, moderation in all things, including moderation.

- Heather: Right? Let's circle back to where we began, and we risk giving a plug to public television, PBS, in doing this, and yet, it is part of your experience as an individual and as a researcher too. What were some of the milestones, do you think, in developing programming that clearly has a beneficial effect on children?

- Yeah, oh, I think one of the biggest milestones is including researchers and educators in the process. So there are some great examples of content creators who've worked with educators and researchers to understand, study how kids learn and try to design media that really works for them. The earliest and most famous example is Sesame Street. So Sesame Workshop has a team of advisors. They work with academic advisors and researchers. They do testing and have researchers on staff who study the impact of the screen time on kids and test whether kids are learning the messages they're trying to teach them.

- Norman: This would've been what, in the '60s?

- Heather: Yeah, late '60s. 

- Norman: Is that still being done for children's programs? There's so much children's programming out there in one medium or another. How could there be time for all of these producers to run it through, you know, child psychologists or whoever it might be?

- Yeah, and most can't. It's costly, right, having folks on staff who can test shows, every single episode, with kids.

- Well, yeah, it holds things up.

- That's exactly right. So I think there are some general principles that are out there. I think we can do a lot more to make those publicly available. Like, what has the last 50 years of research taught us about how kids learn well from video? Principles that content creators can follow, for example. So I think we can all do a better job of trying to get that information out there, but I think we've got enough research now that we can make those principles widely available.

- Which one came first? Sesame Street or Mr. Rogers, or for that matter, The Muppet Show? And what approach did each one of them take?

- That's a good question. Oh, goodness, I don't know the answer to that. I know Mr. Rogers was airing locally before I had access to it where I lived, so it might have actually existed before Sesame Street, but I didn't get access to it until later. And I watched The Muppet Show too. Gosh, I'm dating myself now too. But yeah, I did grow up with all three of these. I think all of these groups, Jim Henson Company, which had earlier made The Muppet Show, Sesame Workshop, and Fred Rogers Company, they've all worked with educators in some way or advisors in some way. How they use that and implement it and what the priority is placed on educational goals versus entertainment goals, that balance is different for each of these content creators. And entertainment isn't necessarily a bad outcome either, but I think that different folks are going to prioritize those things differently. 

- I'm just trying to think of, you know, specific scenes. And of course there's so many, and I was not, let's say, in the right demographic to get those programs on the first wave. And even the second wave was only in passing. But I'm thinking, for example, of Kermit the Frog, and he sings the song "It's Not Easy Being Green," which any number of children for any number of reasons could empathize with.

- Heather: Yep, that's right.

- And so there must be myriad examples, but let's go back over to Fred Rogers and what was the format of that show, and why was it so effective?

- Heather: Yeah, one of the things the show's really famous for, at least in my world, is breaking the fourth wall, right? So he spoke directly to me as a young child in my living room. That was not common for a grown man to make eye-to-eye contact with a young child and tell them that they're important and their feelings matter. I mean, it was really quite profound in a couple of ways. But just the act of breaking the fourth wall and talking directly to the audience is really unique. And more shows do that now, and there's a growing body of research on that and how that might help kids learn better or engage better. So talking directly to the child, but also, Fred Rogers was really innovative and really focusing on the social-emotional world of young children, and really holding that up and making that really important.

- I've heard some criticism that Mister Rogers' Neighborhood may have gone too far in kind of exalting, putting the child on a pedestal and giving them the sense or giving them the implication that they were the center of the world and it should move around them. Have you run into any of that? - I'm aware of this concern.

[both laugh]

I've heard it in lots of different ways, not just about Fred Rogers. Yeah, this is another case where I think reasonable people will disagree about, and I understand both sides of this. But it's hard for me to imagine there is a whole generation of kids running around with enormous egos because Fred Rogers said, "You are special." It's hard to imagine TV has that great of an impact on kids and the rest of the world didn't put us back in our place. But it's possible there's a good balance to strike there and that more research can be done to find out what the right balance is.

- And as far as. . . Oh, well, I have to go back in time now, and I don't know if you've ever run across this or not, but it's gonna play right into our neighborhood here at PBS Wisconsin. There was a show many, many years ago called The Friendly Giant. Have you ever run across that?

- Heather: I've heard of it. I don't think I've seen it, yeah.

- Norman: I think you could probably still get the occasional, you know, YouTube clip out of it. But that first word there in the title, The Friendly Giant. And, of course, traditionally, children would be afraid of a giant, you know, Jack and the Beanstalk and fee-fi-fo-fum, and all that kind of thing. But this was a friendly giant, and he had all kinds of friends. Jerome the Giraffe that he would interview from time to time. 

It was, I believe it was live television, then recorded. But in any event, if there was a glitch in there, they would work with it, incorporate it into the show, which made it even funnier. And so, you know, credit goes to PBS Wisconsin for it, and we're talking about now, late '50s, early '60s, I think, for that show. And so it has been with us in one form or another, but I think, what would you say then would be the principles behind that? I mean, the concept of friendliness, concept of neighborhood, and we haven't really talked about Sesame Street either.

- Yeah, I mean, Sesame Street is sort of an entity unto its own because of its longevity, right? The longest-running show for young kids. The amount of resources that go into testing every episode with kids, so it's having their own research team. It's unlike any other content creation process that I know of. It's been the recipient of both the greatest praise and harshest criticism.

- Has it?

- Because it's been the longest running.

- Oh, okay. What have the criticisms been?

- Well, I think decades ago, when the field of research around kids and screens was really emerging, there was a lot of criticism around the pacing of television and concerns about. . . And these are concerns that have been raised for every new technology, novels, and radio programs, and comic books and all the things, and video games after it. But the same concerns and hopes have emerged for all of these things. So worried that it's going to make kids worse in school because they're spending less time reading or worries about it shortening attention spans. All kinds of things.

- May be too good in a way.

- Mm-hmm, right. If you prefer Sesame Street over first grade, that's a problem. 

- That would be a problem. Sesame Street, though, certainly was devoted to inclusiveness though.

- Heather: That's right. They always have been, and they continue to be, and they continue to have concrete curriculum goals around inclusion.

- Norman: And also a lot of bilingual learning.

- Yep, yep. So having bilingual characters, characters who are fully bilingual to an increasing degree, representing different racial and ethnic subgroups, representing diversity across multiple dimensions.

- And even with Big Bird, dealing in one notable episode with death.

- That's right, yep. They've never shied away from difficult topics, and I think they've considered themselves champions in this world, that they think TV can be a powerful tool for tackling difficult concepts. After the attacks on September 11 in 2001, they had a series of episodes that were tackling hate and bias. They had episodes tackling death and dying, all kinds of things, yep.

- We haven't, with the time left, we could get, I think, briefly into the whole concept of G-rated movies. We haven't really talked about going to the theater. Do people still do that? Last I heard they did, but tomorrow may be another day. But G-rated films, do you have an approach to those? Do you have some that stand out?

- Yeah, I think the way that those are gone about, the way that they're created tends to be really different from TV, at least certain shows that are really targeting young kids. The focus is much more on the story and entertainment as opposed to educational value. But there are certainly ones that have positive themes.

- This concept of the fourth wall has come up from time to time in our conversation. And can the fourth wall, intimate and direct as it may be in video, ever be as effective a learning device as just a real-life 3D conversation?

- There's actually a lot of research on this. It's really interesting. So there's what we call the video deficit effect. So young kids learn less from screens than real-life demonstrations, even if that video is someone looking at them and talking to them like you are talking to me right now. So young kids will learn less from the video version of that than a real-life version of sitting right in front of the person, even if everything else is exactly the same. And early research suggests it's around two and a half or three years old that kids start to learn as well from the video version as the real-life version. So if I'm looking through a window at something versus the TV screen at something, I'll learn equally well. That's around two and a half or three years old. When the task is more difficult, that age creeps up and up. So there might be a video deficit throughout the whole lifespan if we have difficult enough concepts.

- What would you like to see next in a children's video or a show that you haven't seen? What would be just the thing for you?

- The thing I would love, oh, goodness. Oh, that's a tough one; I haven't thought about this. Something I'd love to see in kids' TV. I would love to see a comeback to shows that break the fourth wall with the right timing for young kids to engage. I think a lot of shows break the fourth wall and talk to kids, but there are some earlier shows in that world that had the right pause so that young kids could take time, reflect, and really engage and respond, and now we've got the technology to make it responsive back to the kids and adaptive to them. I'm really curious to see what happens there.

- I'm trying to remember if Captain Kangaroo broke the fourth wall back in his day or not.

- I don't remember. Yeah, he talked to his audience a lot, I guess, his live audience.

- Yes, well, and, of course, the fourth wall is a great technique too. I mean, it worked for The Office, and it was like, oh, suddenly it was seemed like something very new.  And yet, of course, it goes all the way back to Shakespeare and before.

- Right, that's right.

- Very effective with the—

- It's a good device, yeah.

- Yeah, the person on stage or on screen talking directly to you, the audience member.

- That's right.

- Well, thank you for talking directly to us and the audience, Heather Kirkorian.

- Thank you, Norman.

- We'll look forward to hearing more about your research as the world of video continues to expand and diversify.

- Great.

- I'm Norman Gilliland, and I hope you can join me next time around for University Place Presents. 

[gentle music]