The increase in children's screen time over the last few decades has concerned parents, educators, and policymakers alike, due to its association with negative developmental outcomes. Interventions have focused on educating parents about the apparent dangers and coaching them on how to limit screen time. Such interventions are unlikely to be effective if screen time is driven less by parental preference than by parental necessity, supplementing insufficient adult caretaker availability. We show that during the COVID crisis, screen time increased dramatically as a direct result of sudden decrease in adult caretaker availability. This indicates that lower screen time rates prior to the pandemic were not (merely) a function of well-informed parenting but of well-resourced parenting. We discuss implications for policy, as well as for the ongoing scientific debate about whether screen time is actually problematic for development.
We describe guest speaker presentations that we developed to bring language science to elementary school students via videoconference. By using virtual backgrounds and guided discovery learning, we effectively engage children as young as 7 years in in-depth explorations of language science concepts. We share the core principles that guide our presentations and describe two of our outreach activities, Speech Detectives and Bilingual Barnyard. We report brief survey data from 157 elementary school students showing that they find our presentations interesting and educational. While our pivot to virtual outreach was motivated by the Covid-19 pandemic, it allows us to reach geographically diverse audiences, and we suggest that virtual guest speaker presentations will remain a viable and effective method of public outreach.
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