What's your smartphone doing to your baby?

Have you noticed the parents with their pre-school children at the park these days? Have you noticed what they are doing?

Judith Kerr, the veteran children’s author and progenitor of such staples of my children’s growing-up years as The Tiger Who Came to Tea, has noticed.  She’s written a charming story, Mummy Time , all about what really happens in the park when an ordinary, nice, loving mum takes her small child there.

The child has extraordinary adventures in his head, riding on a swan, swinging from trees and meeting a caterpillar, while his mum is permanently glued to her phone. “We had a nice time, didn’t we?” says Mum to her child as they go home, each completely oblivious of the other’s “nice time”.

At least Kerr’s Mummy is talking on her phone – she can see her child out of the corner of her eye. In reality the smartphone is such a powerful and attractive companion that it must be very hard, as a new parent these days, to tear one’s eyes from it. Ask anyone who has a smashed screen after tripping, eyes glued to the screen, over a perfectly innocent paving stone.

A terrifying viral video doing the rounds of guilty-mum chat-rooms recently shows CCTV footage from an indoor paddling pool in China. A woman is seen turning away to look at her phone while her one year old, splashing in an inflatable ring, tips over, head down, into the pool and remains underwater for a horrible 90 seconds. A second toddler desperately tries to attract the attention of the adults – and is ignored. The baby survived but is, according to the most recent information on the episode, in a coma.

Let’s be fair on that poor mother: these things happened before smartphones. My youngest child, while the rest of the family were splashing about at one end of a swimming pool, decided she was going to “teach herself to swim” and quietly took off her armbands before climbing into the pool way out of her depth. As soon as I spotted her, I swam faster than I’ve ever swum in my life towards her and caught her before she went under the third time. Shocked and dripping, I approached the spotty youth in charge. He hadn’t even seen her go in. She was three years old.

I was within minutes of being the mother in the viral video and I didn’t even have a smartphone to blame. Parents have always been at risk of being distracted from our children running into danger by thousands of other interesting things. But the smartphone does something more than simply distract our attention.

In 1975 the US psychologist Edward Tronick and his team devised a remarkable experiment which has become known as the “Still Face” experiment . He persuaded mothers to chat and interact naturally with their baby for a few minutes and then, at a signal from the researcher, to suddenly hold their face still in a blank, expressionless gaze. The response of the baby is invariably poignant and heartrending as the baby first is puzzled, then tries to coax Mum into action, then becomes frightened, distressed or withdrawn. After an interval of time the mother resumes normal expressions.

The experiment has been replicated many times to test hypotheses about perception and communication differences. It isn’t all that easy to replicate because it’s pretty tough on mum and baby.  In one version I’ve read of, in Italy, a fifth of the mums in the study had to drop out because they couldn’t stop themselves from “assuming facial expressions” – which I suspect means they couldn’t help smiling reassuringly at their babies, giving them that facial expression which says “I’m here for you.”

Today I read of the “Intelligent Cot” a £1500 cot which comes with an optional iPad slotted into a holder at one end, at baby-height. The manufacturers, Babeek, claim “our tablets are an optional feature and offer proven benefit in soothing such as white noise”.

“The baby’s day looks more like this: for a significant amount of waking time, the parent’s face, the face with which a pre-smartphone baby would have been interacting, is present in the room, but, because it’s gone into “looking at my phone” mode, unavailable.”

Leave aside the fact that the housing in which the iPad is placed – as far as I can see from the photos on the Babeek Facebook page – will rapidly be used by most babies as a try-out area for those interesting new things, teeth.  Leave aside the fact that if you want white noise (which is similar to the sounds inside the womb), there is a plethora of cheaper gadgets – even an old radio will do. Leave aside the hideous cot itself, which seems to have been designed by a particularly deluded Disney princess. Leaving aside these considerations – what does an iPad add to a baby’s world?

The blue light from the screen interferes with the natural production of melatonin, the hormone which triggers sleep, hardly a recommendation for something in a baby’s cot. And what is the baby watching? YouTube has millions of generated videos which are there solely to entrance small children and keep up the “views” number.

The iPad replaces real interaction. Real interaction means looking at faces and responding to them, then seeing how that response breeds another response. When an adult – it does not have to be the mother – interacts with the baby, the baby mirrors expressions. The adult will instinctively mirror the baby’s expression back – think of how we automatically make a pouty sad face when a baby cries. The activity builds new connections in the brain; this to-and-fro exchange with a real person is a vital part of the baby’s development.

But since we all started carrying smartphones, this has changed. The baby’s day looks more like this: for a significant amount of waking time, the parent’s face, the face with which a pre-smartphone baby would have been interacting, is present in the room, but, because it’s gone into “looking at my phone” mode, unavailable. The smartphone creates a real-life Still Face experiment, dozens of times a day, every day.

Does this matter? Babies in some cultures have spent their babyhoods strapped to their mum’s back, close to her body but out of sight of her face; they turned out all right.  My generation – so our parents boast – spent hours in prams in the garden “getting fresh air” and supposedly gazing at the patterns of leaves on the trees (but probably mostly crying ourselves into an exhausted sleep). We turned out all right. Didn’t we?

All cultures make strange decisions about their children, whether it be throwing away a mother’s first breast milk because it’s “dirty”, or sending seven year olds away to boarding school. And mostly it is surprisingly hard to reach any definite conclusion about the long term effects of any practice.  (The establishment of certain clear risk factors around, for example, sudden infant death syndrome was a long and tortuous process and fraught with controversy all the way through.) Children have always been resilient and adaptable, and adults have always had something of a free pass in exploiting that resilience – we can be fairly sure that however much we mess things up for our children, most of them will sort of get used to it and turn out all right. That’s what Donald Winnicott was driving at with his concept of the “good-enough parent” – children adapt to our failures.

But we still don’t know the long term effects of that “still face” with which modern babies are presented, for minutes at a time, many, many times a day. We don’t know how much effort, if any, modern parents need to put into engaging with their children to make up for it. We just don’t know. We are living through a gigantic Still Face Experiment.

Personally, I feel it is an experiment too far. You, a parent, are your baby’s best toy, your baby’s best learning resource. Don’t throw your baby’s best toy away.