Read this short article published on the Cercle Psy website.

All you have to do is stroll through the toy aisle of a shopping mall, and your sight is caught by flashing lights and your hearing stimulated by synthetic sounds of all kinds. It’s a fact: electronic toys have displaced many traditional toys with their less perceptible flavor.

But are these battery-powered toys really better for children’s language development? That’s the question raised by Jenny S. Radesky and her team. Radesky and her team, whose findings were published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics… two days before Christmas.

The authors point out that empirical studies on the effects of toys on child development are still fairly rare, and that researchers tend to rely on theoretical models in developmental psychology to give an opinion on a particular type of toy. In this study, the authors observed 26 parent-baby dyads in their own homes. The children, aged between 10 and 16 months, experimented with three types of toy: electronic (including a sound farm and a dummy cell phone), traditional (including a puzzle and a construction set) and educational hardback books.

The researchers recorded all the exchanges that took place during the play episode between parent and baby. When an electronic toy was used, exchanges were rarer, words addressed by the adult were less frequent and vocabulary was poorer. The children themselves were more expressive when handling traditional toys, especially books.

So, even though this study is based on a small sample, the authors advocate the judicious use of electronic toys for children’s language development.

Jenny S. Radesky et al (2015). « Keeping children’s attention the problem with bells and whistles. JAMA Pediatrics. Published online. doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2015.3877