Families abolish story time

BarcelonaTelling a bedtime story, making up a tale if the child throws a tantrum at mealtimes, or entertaining them by explaining all sorts of interesting facts when they're in a waiting room, a restaurant, or at the bus stop. Some parents still do these things, but others prefer to give their children a mobile phone or tablet to keep them entertained. When screens take center stage, certain habits that allow family members to connect and spend quality time together—such as reading—are lost.

"In children aged 0 to 8, brain structures are still developing, and what you give them at these ages is what will ultimately shape them. Therefore, if screens take precedence over play, social interaction, and oral communication with parents, the brain develops in a cognitively impaired way," says Núria Pedrós, PhD in Pedagogy and member of the Network of Experts of the Official College of Pedagogy of Catalonia.

This is a situation that particularly worries education professionals. In fact, a few months ago, the British newspaper The Guardian published an article which explained that parents belonging to Generation Z—young parents, barely in their thirties—don't like to read to their children and that screen time has increasingly replaced story time.

"I think the families that are most aware of respectful and supportive parenting aren't the youngest, those who grew up with screens and whom we might call digital natives“These families have a different parenting style, and that also influences their screen time,” says Bryan Pérez, a primary school teacher and coordinator at the Salvador Espriu school in Roda de Berà. He explains that families who share reading time together help children develop healthy reading habits, especially among family members. “It’s also true that some families, due to work-life balance issues or routines, don’t know how to fit this into their daily lives, and finding the time can be a real challenge,” he acknowledges.

Pérez emphasizes the need to acquire good reading habits at home, since without a good role model in this area, it's more difficult to develop them at school. "Children replicate what their parents do in their daily lives: work, communicate, entertain themselves, learn—they do it all with screens. This often relegates reading, which involves effort, interpretation, symbolism, and learning, to the background," laments Núria Pedrós. On the other hand, if they see their parents reading, even if not together, just as they do with screens, they will become interested in what they read. "Reading and reading with them helps focus their attention and enrich their vocabulary. Online vocabulary is very limited, whereas a children's story is specifically designed to improve vocabulary and linguistic structures."

Digital Orphans

In this sense, Pedrós states that the digital world is now creating a new divide, one that leaves behind digital orphans. That is, children who lack guidance when using screens, because they are used as a resource for everything without considering the effects. "And this will lead to these children being intellectually impoverished, lacking attention span and intellectual strategies, and with low cognitive maturity." In fact, Pérez already points out that there are some children who They communicate in a language that is not their own. because of their age or because they lack the tools to, for example, have a conversation, respect a turn to speak, maintain active listening, or know how to answer what you are asking them.

As Laia Bruguera, an early childhood education teacher, observes, the decrease in interaction among family members in favor of mobile phone use is evident and affects children. "Mobile phones have become an emotional pacifier. They get used to them, and then it's much harder for them to learn to cope with frustration. On the one hand, the emotional learning of frustration is hindered, and on the other hand, at a cognitive level, in terms of language, we see the consequences: the development of language interaction is decreasing." This situation also affects children in terms of language acquisition. "We already know that not everyone develops at the same pace, but we are seeing more and more children who They take longer to acquire it, between the ages of three and six."And they do so with a poorer vocabulary," Bruguera maintains. She further explains that this situation snowballs: it accumulates and leads to slower learning in subsequent school years.

Virality and balance

In contrast, Bruguera reveals that nowadays it's very easy for children to be aware of everything that's viral on social media, meaning they haven't just seen it once, but repeatedly. "They internalize it a lot, and we see that this hinders their communication development, makes it harder for them to accept tolerance on an emotional level, and also affects their attention span, since screens are a source of rapid dopamine." Bruguera points out that for these reasons, it's necessary to focus heavily on learning spoken language, and a good way to do this is through stories. "Especially because written language doesn't develop without spoken language."

For his part, Pedrós explains that when there's this excess of screen time, children pay attention to rapid visual and auditory stimuli, which means that when you present them with a slow stimulus, such as reading, which requires them to focus their attention in a different way, they struggle more. "However, I see that when you read them a story, they're completely captivated. They love it. In schools, you try to do this activity because you know they don't do it at home, or they do it very little. And they're happy imagining the stories you tell them, especially in the case of traditional tales, which have deeper messages and values that they don't find by handing out bread." Pedrós emphasizes that, in any case, it's not about completely banning screen use, but about limiting it. "If you ban them, they'll use them with even more enthusiasm. But, at the same time, we must remember that critical thinking cannot be developed without dialogue and conversation, so we have to find a balance."