NPR – Eric Westervelt
“Dr. Dimitri Christakis has done extensive research on blocks and play, and has lectured on media and children. He is the director of the Center for Child Health, Behavior and Development at Seattle Children’s Research Institute…We talked about the way young children learn and how their minds develop. He’s not against digital education tools, but he says they have to be the right kind and age-appropriate. He is raising alarms that Americans are over-charging their infant’s developing brains…the typical preschool child in the United States watches about 4 1/2 hours of television a day, and they’re only awake for about 12 hours a day. So somewhere between 20 and 30 percent of their time is spent in front of a screen, [raising] the question of what are they not doing that they would otherwise be doing? What activities are being displaced? And much of those activities are traditional means of interacting with the environment and with adults.”(more)