Electronic tablets are great for travel and for people who don’t have a lot of space for books.
They are not, a new study concludes, great as a reading tool for your budding learner, however.
Researchers at the University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children's Hospital studied 37 parents reading to their toddlers. Their findings were recently published in the journal Pediatrics.Each parent-toddler pair was videotaped while reading three stories from the Little Critter series back to back.
Each story was shared on a different format: an electronic tablet with enhanced visual and sound effects, an electronic tablet without enhanced effects and a print book with illustrations. Parents were limited to five minutes for each story.
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Then, the research team counted the number and types of interactions each pair shared, such as parents asking their child questions, parents telling their toddler what they’re seeing and parents encouraging their child to point out objects during the story.
"The print book is really the gold standard in eliciting positive interactions between parents and their children," Dr. Tiffany Munzer, a fellow in development behavioral pediatrics at the University of Michigan, told ABC News.
“Our goal with some of the kinds of findings in the study is not to make things harder for parents, but to help them focus on activities that spark interactions with their children where they feel that back-and-forth is really easy.”
Parents were able to get through more of the story in five minutes, and both toddler and adult were more engaged when reading from a print book, according to the study.
Munzer told ABC News she believes the print books were more engaging because of distractions built into e-books, like buttons to press and automated sounds.
“The print book is a really beautiful object in that each parent and child interacts differently over a print book,” she said. “Parents know their children well and have to make it come alive for their child to create that magic.”
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