Toys that Help Babies Learn

The vogue in toy making is to place young children before a screen and expect that they will take in its lessons. However, such hopes contradict research by Catherine Tamis-LeMonda and her colleagues at NYU. Tamis-LeMonda, a professor of developmental psychology, has found that babies who watched someone speaking Mandarin on a screen took in nothing, while babies who learned from an adult who spoke Mandarin were able to differentiate sounds in Mandarin.

Tamis-LeMonda believes that when a baby interacts with an adult, the adult offers the infant other cues, such as melody and pitch, that support the baby's learning. In addition, babies need the synchronous nature of learning live; in other words, they need to hear a word and touch the object to take in its meaning. They don't have this opportunity with screen time, even if they seem enraptured by the lights and sounds of the screen. Parents build on what their children know, helping them stretch their language skills. For example, if a child says, "haaa," the parent could connect that sound to the word "hat," helping the infant extend its language abilities.

Parents should be aware that screens don't make up for the interaction of human-to-human learning. However, Tamis-LeMonda believes that more interactive forms of screen time, such as video conferencing, can permit this type of interaction. But nothing beats simple talk between parent and child.

Source:

Tamis-LeMonda CS & Bornstein MH (2015), Infant world learning in biopsychosocial perspective, In Calkins S (ed.), Handbook of Infant Development: A Biopsychosocial Perspective