What Matters for Young Children's Healthy Digital Media Use and Learning? With Rachel Barr, PhD

For decades, researchers have studied why babies and young children learn differently from screens than they do from real-world experiences. On this episode of Screen Deep, host Kris Perry is joined by Dr. Rachel Barr, Professor of Psychology at Georgetown University and a leading expert in early childhood and digital media. Dr. Barr describes why it’s difficult for young children to learn from digital media, a concept called the “video transfer deficit effect,” and explains which specific features of high quality media paired with parenting practices can support learning and development. Dr. Barr also describes why video chatting is often an exception to screen time guidelines, how family media plans can help family relationships, and the importance of considering children’s environments holistically when studying how they interact with and are impacted by digital media.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Why it can be difficult for young children to learn from digital media and how researchers discovered the “transfer deficit effect” 
• How parental guidance and educational app design can make learning from media easier for children
• What features to look for in educational shows and apps 
• One expert-recommended app for young children and what makes it stand out 
• Why thinking more expansively beyond “screen time” is essential for evaluating your child’s media use
• How parents’ own media use — and how they talk about it with their children — can shape family relationships

For more resources and research on this topic visit the Learn and Explore section of the Children and Screens website (https://www.childrenandscreens.org)

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Music: 'Life in Silico' by Scott Buckley - released under CC-BY 4.0. www.scottbuckley.com.au

Transcript

[Kris Perry]: Welcome to Screen Deep, where we decode young brains and behavior in a digital world. I'm your host, Kris Perry, Executive Director of Children and Screens. 

Today we're gonna dive into ways of understanding the impact of screens on very young children and babies. Joining us is Dr. Rachel Barr, a developmental psychologist, Professor of Psychology at Georgetown University, and also the founder and director of the Georgetown Early Learning Project. The work of Dr. Barr and her colleagues investigates how babies, toddlers, and young children learn and process information from the world around them, including the digital world. She's been a pioneer in going beyond thinking about screen time in isolation to developing a more holistic approach that models how factors like content and context intersect with other influences in children's lives to guide their overall health and development. 

Welcome to Screen Deep, Rachel.

[Dr. Rachel Barr]: Thank you very much, it's great to be here.

[Kris Perry]: You've contributed so much to the field of understanding the effects of media on child health. I want to start by talking about some of your earliest work that became foundational to our collective understanding of some basic limitations young children experience when learning from a screen versus live instruction, now called the Video Transfer Deficit effect. Tell us about what this is and how you and others even discovered it.

[Dr. Rachel Barr]: So what the transfer deficit is, is that children generally three years and under will learn about fifty percent less from a media interaction than they will from a real in-person interaction. This is from picture books, from television, from touch screen, and even to some extent from video chat. 

And the way that we sort of first figured this out was back in the 90s. And we know that children are great imitators. They will copy almost everything, and this is a great way for them to learn about the world around them. So a couple of researchers, Andy Meltzoff and myself, Dan Anderson, we show children how to copy something in the real world. And then we also showed them the same thing on a screen. We made sure that they couldn't just figure it out on their own. That was the control group. And then what we found is that starting around a year of age through to three years of age, children would copy twice as much from the live interaction than from any of these media interactions, and they were pretty – they were pretty reliable. 

So, there's two things to take away from that. One, they were learning from media. And two, there were some constraints or challenges surrounding that learning.

[Kris Perry]: Since those initial findings almost a decade ago, what more have you learned about how that transfer deficit actually works?

[Dr. Rachel Barr]: Right, so we've learned that multiple factors will influence this learning and, in particular, that there's lots of different ways that we can ameliorate it so that we can support children in the digital world and their ability to learn. So one of the really simple things that we did at the beginning is we said, “Okay, so it's quite hard to pick up all of the details,” and as adults we'll realize that too, you might lose track of a story or you sort of get distracted by something in the world and then you watch the episode again and you pick up extra details. 

The same thing happens with little babies where they will watch and once the details are repeated, then their learning really improves. And in one of our first studies we showed if we just doubled the number of times that we showed them how the rattle worked, they copied just the same amount as they had if they were learning from a live interaction. And so one of the things that we know about that is then it partly explains why children ask to read the same book and watch the same movie over and over and over. This is really a way of them sort of picking up these different bits and pieces and piecing it all together for themselves.

But other things that we know is that if the content is well created. So one thing is there's a lot of times sound effects and whistles and bells and everything are added to content. And what we know from research in our lab and lots of others is that sometimes less is more. So when you add a sound effect, you really want to make sure it's very much tied to the action. So it helps the child pay attention to the screen at the time when you want them to. 

The same goes with video games, actually. If you want them to learn, you can put a little box exactly where you want them to learn. And two-year-olds do a lot better if the box is highlighted. They pay attention to the correct part of the screen. They interact with the correct part of the screen, and then they're more likely to learn vocabulary and other great stuff. So design features that really are closely tied to what you want the child to learn, they really reduce the transfer deficit.

 And the third thing that is probably the big one is joint engagement. So we did a study where it was a touchscreen study and 15-month-olds found it quite hard to learn. So we brought in the experts, we brought in parents and we asked parents, “Could they teach their child on the touch screen?” Parents have a ton of really good strategies because they know their babies well. So they made sure the baby was paying attention, they were really warm and engaging, they labeled things back and forth, they looked at what their baby was pointing at, and all of these things are things that you tend to do also when you're book reading or when you're playing with your child. And it turned out the more that the parents did all of those great parenting strategies that just sort of — they applied naturally, the transfer deficit went away. And in fact this was my biggest finding ever — they were 19 times better at the task if their parents use these strategies. So joint engagement really is a major ingredient to help reduce that transfer deficit.

[Kris Perry]: Wow, that's a big difference. And we've been talking about this transfer deficit effect found in younger children. You mentioned 15-month-olds, young, you know — babies, infants, toddlers, preschoolers. Has it been studied in older children?

[Dr. Rachel Barr]: Yeah, so at the moment up to five years of age, it's still being documented. And the key is the challenge, right? How complex it is. So Heather Kirkorian did a study where they were looking at how well children could judge distance. And this was a really quite challenging task. And they found that up to about five years of age, children still learned less from the video from the live experience. And we also did another task with tangrams, but we made the tangrams quite tricky. And when we made the tangrams trickier, then it was much harder for them to transfer from a touchscreen to real objects. 

However, even though it's not documented so well after that, if we think about experiences during Zoom or even just listening to podcasts and so on, most people will report that it actually is harder to learn from those interactions than from live interactions. It's just that by the time we're adults, we're really good at understanding the limits of our learning — we'll go back, we'll replay parts of the podcast, we've got a lot more context to add information, we understand all the bells and whistles in media. And so — although new forms of media sometimes challenging for adults, as well. So even though it's not well documented in older adults, we still think that there is a bit of a gap in learning from media than live.

[Kris Perry]: And just anecdotally, I bet you and I could agree that we've experienced that, where it's a little different when you consume information or text on a screen versus on a page. And it makes it easier almost to understand what you're describing because we've all experienced that and then come up with ways of enhancing our own learning. It almost seems like our ability to learn from screens really depends on cognition. So children's cognitive readiness to learn the content and then manage learning or attention in the digital environment is something unique. It's not — it's different than how we may have learned before. Now children are learning how to learn through a digital environment that offers them maybe different options or different opportunities to replace or enhance information that they didn't gain the first time through. Is that what you're describing?

[Dr. Rachel Barr]: So what we've actually found is that the challenges in learning from any form of media, including books, are quite similar. It's just that book reading tends to be automatically more supported in educational settings, but we expect more from other forms of media. So we expect that we'll understand everything because the story will be told because there's audio and visual content, or a touch screen has got all these interactive components. 

But what we found is that, actually, it's still quite challenging for young children as they're learning how all of these systems work for them to pick up information. So in each situation it is new learning opportunities, but they also need support to learn how all of these gadgets work. And each time we come up with a new device, they have to learn new things. So when there was first a mouse, they had to learn. And if people are listening to this and don't know what a mouse is, it used to be attached to a computer and it was very hard to use and then — but that was actually a big thing that whenever there was computer interactions, parents and kids had a lot of tech talk about how does the mouse work, and what does it do, and where does it go, and how do I make this thing move or whatever.  And then when the touchscreen came along, it seemed really, really intuitive, like kids would just swipe. But they didn't necessarily know that if they were swiping from one scene to another, how those pieces of information connected. So they always need media mentors around them to support that learning and help them connect the dots with the content they're learning. 

So I do think that it's a different world, but it's still, the same strategy is applied — having a media mentor, a guide, to help you learn what all that content means and transfer it to the real world is the same across all of these different devices.

[Kris Perry]: Huh. So this deficit effect relates to cognitive development, and if it does, does it also affect memory?

[Dr. Rachel Barr]: So that's a really — if we go back to this repetition thing, it's dependent upon our ability to hold information in mind. So it's dependent upon our working memory. So as kids get older, they're able to hold and retrieve and combine information in better ways. So it's dependent on that memory. It's dependent also on the number of times that they see this information presented. So their memory improves with the different repetitions. 

But it also depends on their whole sort of life history. So if you've watched multiple episodes of Thomas the Tank Engine, you kind of know what's coming next. You know that there's going to be some sort of conflict and some resolution and that you know who the different characters are. So that learning history around the characters and the content then helps the children piece that information together and learn more the next time around. 

So if things are sort of well designed and well structured, then that supports their learning and their memory and then the subsequent time that they are exposed to that content. So yes, memory is very much employed — memory in the moment, long-term memory, and then those repeated effects over time.

[Kris Perry]: So those repeated effects, so the repeating of content helps when learning from screens. Does that mean that to learn effectively from screens, children should spend more time on screens?

[Dr. Rachel Barr]: Not necessarily, right? So this is the thing, the biggest challenge that we hear from parents is figuring out what sort of content to choose. And that has become — that is one thing that has changed very dramatically over a short period of time. It's such a challenge for parents to figure out, “Well, you know, if everything on YouTube is considered educational, then how do I choose?” So figuring out content that is educational, and then spending a shorter amount of time with high quality content, and then repeating it can be more effective for learning. But unfortunately, sometimes the way that business models are designed, they will set up algorithms to just keep moving you to a different piece of content. And that's not so helpful for parents or for young children who are trying to understand what's going on in this world. 

So to answer, it doesn't have to be more time, but the content and the quality of the content is really key. And making sure that there's characters that the child can understand, that the storylines are relevant to them, like, that maybe it's about going to the park, or having dinner, or fighting with your siblings, or playing with your friends. These are things that are relevant to children that they can map onto their real lives and then when they see it one or two times, they can learn. 

So just to give an experimental study, Dan Anderson did a study with Blues Clues and originally, three-year-olds could not learn the clue. So they were worried, “Well maybe it's too hard, maybe we just — it just has to be for five-year-olds because they can get it the first time around.” But when the three-year-olds watched it two or three times, they actually managed to learn the clue and they learned the structure and then Blue's Clues has the same structure every time. So they could learn, they needed the structure to be set up to help them learn and they need a little bit of repetition, but they didn't need a ton more time.

[Kris Perry]: So I'm really glad we're focusing on repetition and what a key factor that is in retention and memory and different kinds of memory. And much of that is enhanced by the content itself being educational. And I, for one, have heard lots of concerns about how educational lots of the children's media is at this point in time. And I'm hopeful that, over time, researchers like you and what you've learned will get more incorporated into the design of educational media and technology so that young kids have a better chance to improve their memory and retention and cognition because ultimately, those are such important skills to have and so much, you know, as everything's changing so rapidly. And I, you know, really wonder sometimes while we're in this in-between state where things are called “educational” and they may or may not be. Are there recommendations for parents who really want truly educational content?

[Dr. Rachel Barr]: So the thing for parents, there's lots of things for parents to look out for, but there's a couple of sort of — one easy switch is if you could install PBS Kids on your screen and remove YouTube Kids, then you definitely have a much higher chance that — because PBS Kids has included research, tested the content, made sure that children do actually understand what's going on, created characters, developed them, and so on. And there's other platforms that have done that as well. But, like, PBS Kids is one that is is an easy go-to because of the investment. I mean, it's taxpayer money, right? Like we've all invested in this over many years. And that's the benefit that can come to parents and all of us as taxpayers, right? 

It is a challenge. The things that — what you're talking about is the importance of child-centered design. And so if you're looking out for child-centered design, one thing to look out for is are there good stopping points? And that's one thing that is not conducive with, say, the business model. So is there good stopping points? Does it get to the end of the episode and say, “Oh well, friends, it's time to do something else.” And that's kind of another — that's a good clue for parents, as well. That this is more child-centered, that it's a time-limited, special event like a book or like a story or playing with a friend, then that time-limited piece, then you move on to doing something else. So that's one child-centered piece that is not in, you know, prolonging engagement models. 

The other thing is that there's good characters. So, if the kid is sort of — Elmo is another key one, lots of kids say, Elmo — very early in development — he's very relatable, he's based on a three-year-old child. Again, 30 to 40 years of research now has gone into understanding how it is that that content can be conveyed to children. 

So looking for good characters, looking for stopping points, looking that there has been investment in producing the content from educators. Those are three sort of things to look for.

[Kris Perry]: And the natural stopping points as those off ramps that are built in. That’s a really big difference between YouTube kids and PBS kids. It's a really big difference. 

What about media use more generally with young children under three or four? Have you found cognitive outcomes differ between infants and children who have had more TV or other screen exposure and those who have had less?

[Dr. Rachel Barr]: Yes, the type of content is really critical. So if we can separate it into content that is child-directed, educational, this child-centered that we've been talking about versus background TV or TV that is more for the parents. So you can think of even something like the Home Television Network, or a cooking show. These cooking shows, or a sports game — the child will pay very little attention to it. So it might be just on in the background. However, what we know is that this type of content actually predicts poorer outcomes in preschoolers and concurrently with preschoolers than child-directed content. 

And why would this be? This is because every time on the cooking show that they say, “Oh, and now it's time to add the secret ingredient.” The child will look up. The secret ingredient means nothing. So they go back to their play. And what happens then is that their play is less complex because they've been interrupted in their play. Or they say to their parents, “Oh, can I have some help building this tower that I'm in the middle of building?” But the parent is then also paying attention to the secret ingredient, so they're slower to respond. So this type of content doesn't make any sense to them, it interrupts their play, and it interrupts their interactions with their parents. So over time, cumulatively, this interferes with their learning cognition and executive functioning, is what we call this ability to organize and plan and so on. Whereas child-directed content does not.

[Kris Perry]: Really interesting distinction. You know, one of the exceptions I've heard of many times when it comes to infant screen time, and this is true of mostly, at most all guidelines, is video chatting. And why is that? What is the most healthy way to use video chatting with small children, and why is it recommended?

[Dr. Rachel Barr]: Right, so video chat is slightly different. What we're having here is a back and forth. So you are asking me a question, I respond, I make a mistake, I can correct myself. And this ability to go back and forth and for you to then give me a clue or say, I could say to you, “Oh, I think I see the book behind you, the Children and Screens book.” And you can turn around and see that it's on your shelf, right? And what that does is it allows you to make sort of a direct connection between your world and the child's world. 

And what we've done is we've seen in a lot of different studies, we conducted these lovely studies during the pandemic called the “Zoomers and Boomers.” And what we were able to do is to see all of these really clever ways that grandparents engage with their grandbabies over video chat at a time when they couldn't see their children. And what we found is that the other secret ingredient was how warm and engaging those grandparents were with their grandbabies, and then when they were warm and engaging, the child was much more likely to go and share their meal or bring a toy to show them or they were more likely to just simply be happy to be engaged. And then if the grandparents then had other fun games like a scavenger hunt or they had the dog in the room and they showed the dog or these other lovely sort of little extra activities, then this also helped the child engage more. 

These are things that we know from 50 to 60 years of developmental science, that these are things that support children's language development, support their social development over time. And these grandparents did an amazing job of bringing that to the child, and then the child could have a response back and forth. And you know, just lovely things like sharing Cheerios and making sure that the granddad had got the Cheerio through the screen and these pretend play-and-sharing activities. 

So this is why it's very different than a static show where there's not that feedback, not that back and forth, not that individual information that I can see into your world and you can see into mine.

[Kris Perry]: That reminds me of your earlier point about joint attention or joint viewing that has — enhances some of those outcomes for kids and how important these relational pieces are to their learning. 

But I wanna shift gears a little bit to something you've started to touch on a few times. One idea you've championed is that it's difficult to ascribe any one specific factor of media use to impacts on children. Instead, it seems, you try to approach this work through an ecological lens, exploring how intersecting environmental influences work together. So would you mind telling us a little bit about that approach and how to apply it to child health and digital media use?

[Dr. Rachel Barr]: So what is it that is important to consider in the whole family media ecology? So for the longest time and even for the whole of this podcast, I've really focused primarily on the child and what is the child's memory? What is the child's learning? What is the child's outcome? And in fact, children grow up with other people. And given, if we just think about the last 30 years, that digital world has become so much more complex with so many more devices and everybody has their own device now. Children have a tablet, parents have a phone, there's the television, there's Alexa, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. 

And so what we need to consider is how all of those different interactions are happening together. So the parent may be trying to work from home, has a number of different notifications on their phone, asking them to do this and that and the other. And so they check their phone. And this may happen, you know, 50 to 100 times throughout the day. This may then disrupt ongoing interactions, these play interactions that I've been talking about between the parent and the child. The child might have an older sibling who has a very different need or want for content. So is there multiple tablets? Is one child playing in one corner but sort of being disrupted by the noise of the sibling? Are they watching together? So what we need to do is think a little bit more about the whole family and how they're interacting with all of this media content that's embedded in the world. 

And one other thing, this is based on an extension of Bronfenbrenner’s very famous ecological theory. So the child is at the center, we're thinking about all of these things that are impacting that child who's changing and developing over time, their memory's developing, they have different personalities, et cetera. And then they're growing up now in this world that is saturated with media. So the parent might be really busy with work. So they may have a decision about what to do, like maybe the child sees that show, then the child is watching on their own, they may or may not be learning as much, it might be good quality content, it might not. The child might be really happy when the stopping point comes, the child might be really upset when the stopping point comes. So we've got this whole sort of dynamic system of using media versus, let's say, the video chat example that I just said, the parent may think, “Well, it'd be nice to connect with my family right now.” They have a video chat with their grandparent, they have a really nice  back-and-forth interaction that then a few days later they think, “Oh, well, it'd be really nice to connect with the grandparent again.” And over time, the child then forms this relationship with the grandparent that ends up having, we know, has positive consequences over time. So there's all of these different decision points, which makes it hard to just say all screen time is gonna result in the same outcome, all screen time is gonna result in the same outcome for each child, because each child will respond differently. 

And then the final thing is, again thinking about the Bronfenbrenner lens, not everyone has equal access to content. So if there is only the option to have free content that has lots of ads that is not well produced, then a child may be exposed to poor quality content. Or they might have really dodgy internet, so the internet keeps going out. So the video chat is not as great because the device is old or there's under-connectivity within the community. So everybody is not necessarily getting the same access to the benefits or the risks of media based on the neighborhood environment that they're growing up in. 

So taking all that together, just to summarize, it's really important to consider who the child is, what the circumstances of the family is and the access and not just access to media, but thinking about the access to other resources. Is the — is it a safe neighbourhood? Is there access to quality childcare? Is this a state that has paid leave? All of these things will support the child and the family more broadly and then also influence when and how they use media within their lives. So that's why I don't think we can just say it's the amount of time and outcome.

[Kris Perry]: I'm so glad you brought up Broffenbrenner and the ecology of childhood. I know that that's been updated recently to talk about the impact of digital media on children's environments at every level, whether it's at the individual level, the parental level, the community level, and even at the societal level where decisions are made about our access to digital media and devices at levels that we almost don't control. And I worry about how much of that isn't really visible or clear to parents that are navigating these really challenging environments — is something educational or not? I mean, you've highlighted the complexity of the digital environment children find themselves in today, and I'm sure you weren't alone in focusing specifically on the child in isolation in your research. But now I think, what are the limits of that traditional research model, of testing one lever or one factor at a time when thinking about children's health more holistically?

[Dr. Rachel Barr]: Yeah, and I have thought about this quite a lot. And I think the one thing to think about is that we don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater either, right? And what I've focused on is this idea of convergence. So it's really — we can get really good mechanistic or causal relationships if we do manipulate different levers and set up good experiments. We can get a lot of, like, population level information about health from doing these wide-scale surveys. And not just in the US, but across the globe, so that we get a much better understanding of how — because digital media is global, right? So we want to think about how it's affecting kids across the globe. 

We can also then figure out, “Okay, well, what happens if we have one intervention that, say, supports families in choosing good quality content or provides guidance on joint engagement or technoference, sort of ways to reduce how media might interfere?” We can then say, “Well, how does that impact, or that causally change or associate, with these other outcomes?” And together, we can take that big population level data, the experimental data that we understand, well, what — is it a brain related thing? Is it language? Is it density? Is it, you know, like really fine-level things versus, well, is that something going on at a country level where paid leave is really the driver that's supporting families and supporting their ability to figure out this digital world? And then in between, if we do give some supports around intervention, does that then lead to healthier digital habits? 

And that would be, what I would say, “convergence” from the population level down to the experimental level and everything in between. And when we have convergence, then we can provide good guidance to policy makers, to parents, to educators, health professionals.

[Kris Perry]: Parents are always asking us about how much screen time their children of different ages should get, but your work and others advocate for a more nuanced approach to understanding screen exposure. What are the most important factors families should consider when it comes to their young children's screen exposure when looking at it through that ecological lens?

[Dr. Rachel Barr]: I think one thing I would direct them to is that the AAP has just come out with some excellent guidelines around the ecology of media. So Tiffany Munzer has done this really nice work for professionals, for parents as well. And what that work is suggesting is that it's really important to consider your own family. Like, what are your family's needs? How many, you know, you've got multiple different kids. So how do you balance the needs of the baby and the three-year-old? How do you also balance your own time and needing to take a break? And then, it then can become overwhelming. So then you kind of need a plan and some intentionality around it. 

So one, I think, really simple thing to do at the end of the day is to say, “You know, was that scrolling — did that make me feel better or worse? And after my child watched Thomas, how did they — how was their behavior? Did they seem happier? Did they go play with their trains? Or was it sort of more upsetting?” And so just sort of taking that time to be intentional about how is it that media is fitting into your family's life? How is it affecting you? How is it affecting your children? And then saying, “Okay, well, actually, it turns out that for my child, the morning is a great time for them to have a little break with media. But actually not every day, because some days it's really sunny and I'd like to go out to the park and my son wants to go out to the park at that time, too.” 

So thinking about a plan that is flexible and works for your family, the AAP has tools to do this. The family media plan is available to start walking through and thinking about what would work for your family. It's a bit harder than just saying one hour a day, but over time parents have told us that figuring out what works for them has been quite effective. And then thinking, “Okay, well, what is too much,” as well. You want to think, “Okay, if it's going to be too many hours, is it interfering with other things that I'm doing?” And again, the plan sort of helps you think, “My child needs some time to sleep. We need to have meals. We need to go to school. I need to figure out time to get to work, et cetera.” So how do we balance all those things in an intentional media plan? And it does take time, but it has — parents report that it’s quite effective to take that time and sort of — basically, to take the control back for themselves of this digital world.

[Kris Perry]: I really appreciate the nuanced approach because right now there are policies coming out all the time. Parents are probably experiencing this in their schools where they're banning smartphone use and kids are experiencing longer stretches, maybe, without screen time and that's not a very nuanced approach, right? That's, like, all on or all off. So I appreciate that at home, it's not quite so simple. There are many, many factors to juggle when you're a parent. 

And one of the environmental factors for children's media use is parental media use. What's your work showing about how parents are using media and how that's intersecting with how they parent or about the child-parent relationship?

[Dr. Rachel Barr]: So there has been work for a period of time. Brandon McDaniel and Jenny Radesky came up with this term, “technoference.” I'm just going to quickly do this. And what you might notice is that when the phone is in front of my face, it's quite flat and I'm disconnected from you, even over a Zoom screen. And so this, as I said, you can have multiple notifications throughout the day and this may disrupt or interfere with relationships, parent-child relationships. And that has been shown, like there's been studies in restaurants and playgrounds and so on. 

However, some — what we're also finding now that we're actually observing more — is that it does disrupt interactions. That's just straightforward. However, different parents negotiate it in different ways. So some parents will say, “Okay, I've just got two minutes and then I'm going to come back and play with you. I can see that you're playing with this and I know that you're waiting and thank you for waiting while I do this.” Right? So there's different ways and then they do put the phone down and then they are able to go back. Again, it's sort of a more intentional thing. Sometimes you're on a deadline and you just really need to get something done. And then there is, you know, a point where the child may be going and playing with his siblings or, you know, watching a screen or whatever else. Or you're trying to cook a meal or you're trying to do these other things and also still trying to respond to an email. So media can interfere with relationships multiple times throughout the day, but parents can also repair those interactions by talking through, “This is what I'm doing, this is why I'm doing this, and I'm gonna come back and see you in a minute.” And again, that's a very, very common parenting strategy that's really effective for young children and even for teenagers, like, “This is what I'm doing and why.”  

And then having a plan, going back to that media plan to say, “Okay, I'm really — I'm going to turn my phone to ‘do not disturb’ just for this period of time. I'll tell my work colleagues that I really — I'm out for an hour at this period of time,” so that the technoference is not disrupting them. 

But one other thing that we have been finding is that when parents do take media, use media just for a short break for themselves, it turns out that they actually end up having more positive connections with their children later on. The child's mood is good, so sometimes taking a break is also a good thing for a parent. Also connecting, like, this FaceTime thing, that also results in more positive mood and more back-and-forth interactions, as well. 

So how and when you're using it and the reasons that you're using it. We don't ask parents enough about that and we are only just starting to do a better job at that to find out why and when and how they're using it. So every one of us is getting distracted multiple times per day, but how and why we're dealing with those distractions is something we're finding out more about and how they can support or disrupt parent-child relationships.

[Kris Perry]: That's the third time you've mentioned the importance of the human connection when it comes to enhancing media use so that it has better impacts and more lasting useful impacts. So I'm glad you're using these real examples of families working together to create better digital media environment. 

What led you to specialize in this field? Did you have an aha moment where you realized this is what you wanted to spend your time investigating?

[Dr. Rachel Barr]: Well, like many other people, I sort of fell into this a little bit. So I focused on memory. I was doing clinical training and I was really interested in how kids copy. So I asked parents to write down all of the different things that their children were copying, how they were playing with their siblings. And it was these great diaries. But in the midst of everything, people said, “...and my baby danced to The Wiggles.” And The Wiggles is this Australian show — I'm from New Zealand — it’s this Australian show and there was always a lot of dancing — these characters, the “Big Red Car,” if you haven't seen it, it's great. 

But the thing that was really interesting to me at that time was that the child was learning information from the screen and transferring it into their real lives. And so then my advisor and I started looking to see, “Well, how much research is there on babies learning from screens?” And at the time there was very little. So then we set up some imitation studies to look to see, “Well, how is it that they are actually doing that learning from The Wiggles and understanding and sort of being engaged with that content?” And that's when we started our first transfer deficit studies.

[Kris Perry]: So what's next for you? Do you have something in mind that feels really urgent that you want to study about child health and screen use?

[Dr. Rachel Barr]:  I think what is urgent is thinking more about how the brain is processing information. So, how is it affecting sleep? Is it to do with — we've done some studies looking to see, is it blue light? We don't think it is much blue light as we used to think, especially for babies, especially if it's a short period of content, we just published that. But it could be something to do with the arousing content. So is it that — or the speed and complexity of the content that is just sort of overwhelming the system or that it is making it really hard for the brain to process? And so I think what I would be really excited about looking at is how is the complexity of this content — which has actually been increasing over time, we've just been finding that when looking at YouTube videos — how is that complexity being processed by the brain? How's the body responding to that complexity? And is that sort of influencing their ability to sleep? Is it influencing their language? Is it influencing their attention abilities? So I think that's one area that is quite urgent for us to understand so that we then can figure out, well, what is something that they can process more easily that doesn't physiologically dysregulate them, but improves regulation and then improves learning and attention and so on, so that we can actually create better content for children and parents. 

And I think the other thing that is urgent is a bit more support for families around digital media. So how do I choose the content? And there's some really great work going on, obviously, at Children and Screens, at the AAP, but just also some, you know, sort of hands-on, more tools that parents can actually go to and figure out. And testing whether or not those tools are effective, because there's only so much time that people have in their day. So really making sure that when we're producing tools and producing information for families that it's effective and I think we need to do a bit more in connecting with families and asking like, “What's working and what else do you need in order to support you in the digital age?”

[Kris Perry]: Thank you so much, Rachel, for coming onto the podcast today and helping us understand the many contexts and complexities we should be thinking about when we consider the developmental impacts of screen use on young children. It's a delight to talk to you and hear about your work. 

If you'd like to learn more about the research discussed in this episode or explore evidence-based resources for families navigating digital media, visit ChildrenandScreens.org. And if you found this episode helpful, please consider subscribing to Screen Deep and sharing it with someone who's thinking carefully about children, technology, and mental health. 

I'm Kris Perry. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time on Screen Deep.