Negative impacts of early screen exposure

[Dr. Joan Luby] Potential negative effects of early screen exposure: perhaps most important is the content of media. In the research that we’ve done, and many others have done, exposure to violence early in life is a robust predictor of negative outcomes. And even if children are not initially exposed to violence in screens, what we find are that algorithms are written so that children can rapidly become exposed to violent content, even if that’s not what the parent thinks they’re setting the child up for. Of course, there’s also the lack of exposure to live human interaction, something that is fundamentally important to the healthy social and emotional development of the young child. The other issue that we know about screens, and that empirical research has validated, is that children who engage with screens, that’s time that they are not spending with their primary caregiver or with live interactions with other humans, and screens are not a substitute for this.