Government research doesn’t prove screen time ‘damages’ toddlers’ speech

Reports in the Guardian, BBC News and the Telegraph this week said that government research found that large amounts of screen time damaged children’s vocabulary.

This isn’t quite right, and we’re grateful to the Guardian, BBC News and the Telegraph for amending their articles after Full Fact got in touch.

The research did find that two-year-olds whose parents reported giving them the highest amounts of screen time (averaging around five hours per day) could say about 53% of a set of 34 test words commonly used by children this age. This compared with 65% for two-year-olds who reportedly had the least screen time (averaging around 44 minutes per day).

But this doesn’t mean that the research proved screen time “damages” or “limits” children’s vocabulary, as the Guardian, Telegraph, and BBC articles originally put it.

This is a classic case of correlation versus causation. While high screen time was correlated with worse vocabulary, it might be that both these issues are the effects of something else—low income, for example. Or the chain of causation might work the other way, perhaps if parents of children with developmental problems treat them differently by giving them screens for longer periods of time.

The research explicitly makes this point in its introduction, saying “Results cannot identify causal factors directly but highlight correlations worthy of further investigation.”