Best Practices for Using Video Chat with Young Children

[Dr. Rachel Barr]: We actually asked families if we could video these video chats, it’s very meta, and we did this before the pandemic and also during the pandemic and with different groups of families. And what we found is that you need to keep the video chat short and frequent, that children make up for loss of physical contact, that children and families share really exciting things across the screen like this space shuttle and animals, and the important thing is that they’re very good at this back and forth sharing of information. And finally, that relationships really matter, this back and forth, the baby was happiest the more sensitive and engaged the grandparent was. And the key thing about this is we had in-person and we had video chat and it was the engagement and the connection, not the platform, that was important. So back to a key premise of early child development. What matters, just like in real estate, in infancy, it’s relationships, relationships, relationships.