Early Literacy – Screen Time vs Facetime
Interview with Melissa Phillips , Senior Manager of Children’s Services at Libertyville Public Library, Libertyville Illinois.
What is early literacy?
Early literacy skills help children get ready to read. In short, early literacy is what children learn about reading before they learn to read.
Children are born ready to develop language skills, but they need help from the adults in their lives to develop these skills. Fortunately, the skills are developed through 5 familiar (and free!) practices:
- Talking
- Reading
- Writing
- Singing
- Playing
The central activity is talking: parents should talk to their child as much as possible. Ask your child a question, wait a few beats, and then respond.
Face-to-face communication with your child is very important. We often don’t realize how much time we spend looking at our phones. Now more than ever, it is important to be intentional in our communication with our children.
Do children under age of 1 year really understand reading?
If you mean, do they understanding decoding, then the answer is no. Children need to learn that letters represent sounds and that sounds come together to form words and that words are really symbols of things and concepts.
Adults often exclaim about how their children know from an early how to swipe the phone or iPad. Children learned how to do this by observing the adults in their life. Just as they learn how to navigate a digital device, they need to learn how to navigate the technology of the printed word.
How does a parent’s screen time impact their child?
In the words of one of my colleagues working in early literacy: “We hold a world of distraction in our hands.”
The primary impact of adult screen time is that it reduces the amount of time spent communicating face-to-face with the child. Smart phones and digital tablets have been around for little more than a decade, and in that time, they have become central to how we live our lives. As I mentioned earlier, children are born ready to develop language skills. And through these skills, children learn about the world. The primary way children learn language skills is through communication with the adults in their lives.
Modern life has introduced us to things that are increasingly more interesting to look at than each other, increasingly more interesting to listen to than each other. For the first time in human history, we need to be reminded to look at each other and talk to each other. Parents are their children’s first and most important teachers.
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