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Infants come equipped with higher learning skills—it's up to adults to encourage their development, and foster their natural sense of agency. So what's the best way to do that? Help them create their stimuli, not just consume it, says parenting expert Janet Lansbury. Screens are a fact of life for the modern infant, following them everywhere they go in their parents' hands or pockets. How does screen-based learning affect their development? Mobile devices aren't the devil, but understanding how an infant's mind is developing can help you choose the best toys for the kid in your life. Screens, even small ones, can be incredibly overstimulating. Babies are soaking in their environment constantly, and their senses are stimulated by the movement of hair, light coming through the window, a small noise—they are all mysteries a baby tries to solve. Screens are entertaining, but their mystery is too complex and it doesn't adequately demonstrate the cause and effect needed for learning. Lansbury explains how to choose the toys that will help kids become active learners—exercising their creativity and analytic mind— rather than being passive learners. Janet Lansbury is the author of No Bad Kids: Toddler Discipline Without Shame and Elevating Child Care: A Guide to Respectful Parenting

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JANET LANSBURY:

Janet Lansbury's passion for parent education began when she became a mother and sought guidance from infant expert Magda Gerber. Deeply inspired and grateful for her wisdom, she began training with Magda professionally. For the last 20 years, Janet has taught RIE parenting classes in Los Angeles, been a presenter at numerous early childhood conferences, written parenting articles, and served on the board of directors of Resources for Infant Educarers (RIE).

Janet is privileged to now be supporting hundreds of thousands of parents across the globe through her website JanetLansbury.com, sharing insights gained through her parenting classes and personal experiences as a mother of three. Janet encourages parents and child care professionals to perceive babies as unique, capable human beings with natural abilities to learn without being taught; to develop motor and cognitive skills; communicate; face age appropriate struggles; initiate and direct independent play for extended periods; and much more.

She is the author of two books on parenting: Elevating Child Care: A Guide to Respectful Parenting and No Bad Kids: Toddler Discipline Without Shame. Her podcast, “Janet Lansbury Unruffled” is one of the most downloaded parenting podcasts on the web and recommended listening by "The Washington Post.” Her audio series "Sessions" is available on her website and features intimate recorded consultations with parents.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Janet Lansbury: When we’re considering offering young children technology and mobile devices or other kinds of screens when they’re very, very young we have to consider, first of all, the stimulation factor. These are brand-new people to the world that are very, very sensitive and highly aware, and all of this works to their great advantage as learners and absorbers of their environment and life.

We develop more in the first three years than the whole rest of our life put together, so they’re able to learn from an empty room, being at a position where they’re ideally free to move their bodies, so they’re able to turn their heads—we say start infants on their backs for that reason—and they could be fascinated by dust particles or the corner of the room or natural light coming in, a number of things, and they are learning something from that, they’re figuring something out. So when we offer technology it’s an onslaught on their senses basically. Not so much a phone but a larger screen. But even a mobile device or a small screen, it’s not something they’re going to be able to master, it’s not something they’re going to be able to understand how it all works.

Imagine an infant who, from the RIE approach, we believe wants to be capable, wants to be competent, wants to be able to do things and feel a sense of agency in the world right away rather than being passive to something that sort of takes over and you’re drawn into it because there’s so much going on there.

For young children it can be very over-stimulating and it can discourage them from being the active learners that we want them to be, that wi...

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