How do electronic devices like tablets affect young children? What is important for healthy child development? And what does this have to do with salutogenesis? An interview by the magazine «Info3» with Philipp Gelitz, professor at Alanus University. Anna-Katharina Dehmelt asked the questions.
In 2017 Sweden passed a law making the introduction of tablets in kindergartens compulsory to ensure early media education. The project was scientifically monitored and as a result the tablets were withdrawn again in 2023. What is your view on this?
It is good to know that the political decision to rescind the law was based on scientific expertise. It is reassuring when decisions are not ideologically motivated but rely on science – something one would wish for in many places. As far as I can see science tells us now that the use of screen media is measurably detrimental to child development, the more so the younger the children are, and that these media should not be used at all in the first three years. This is not Waldorf opinion but current scientific knowledge.
Why should screen media not be used in the first three years of life?
The young child’s body including the brain is open to all impressions. Newly born children have innate reflexes and need to first of all «take hold» of their body. That is not Waldorf opinion either but a widely known anthropological constant. We develop our vision from perceiving colour, our hearing by listening to sound and we perceive our own movements. Once a medium is inserted between the child and reality, experience only happens second-hand. The whole breadth of experience – taking hold of the body, mobility, sensorimotor integration, the development of each single organ, the maturing of the brain – is interrupted; the experiential horizon is restricted since essential bodily experiences of touch, inner vitality and balance are not taking place when children just sit their swiping on a tablet. Children who don’t have the opportunity to practise balancing thousands of times early in life will be physically less dexterous later and the range of experiences neuronally represented in their brain will be reduced. And this cannot be caught up on later in life. Children cannot say, «Never mind. I can play in puddles and jump over tree trunks when I’m 25.»
How does the content conveyed by the media affect children?
The content is one thing. Some of it is amazingly stupid, other content is kind of acceptable or irrelevant. The actual problem from the point of early years’ education, however, is the lack of congruence that not even the most beautiful animal film can justify, because what children see on the screen does not coincide with what they hear, smell or taste at that moment. Reality presents itself in fragments that do not add up to a coherent whole. There is a picture, which is also lacking depth, a disembodied voice commenting, fast cuts, random music. Nothing goes together. When I bite into an actual apple, the «crunch» I hear is accompanied by a taste in my mouth and a fragrance in my nose, and I can see the apple. This profusion of different sensory modalities is absent from media consumption. Children are brought up to not wholly trust in their sensory perceptions. In addition, there is the sensory overload that paralyzes children’s ability to form their own pictures, in other words develop their own imagination, because they are presented with ready-made pictures from outside. It is like a drug taking the place of their own activity – another major problem.
How is this from the age of three?
All pedagogical experience speaks against the use of screen media until the age of seven, eight or nine. Up until that age children learn mostly implicitly from the world around them because they don’t have the bodily foundation yet that is required for explicit learning. This only develops from the beginning of formal schooling on the basis of strong sensory experiences. Even in school, the most important medium to learn from is a human being rather than a content-conveying device.
What is implicit learning? It is an enormous step from infancy to school age, the biggest developmental step we take as humans. Children learn so much at this early age. How do they learn?
Implicit learning means that we cannot actually prevent children from learning. We don’t need to teach children explicitly because they come into the world equipped with natural curiosity and interest. What they need first of all is a strong bond with their parents or primary caregivers. Children need to be wrapped in loving care. If they have that, they have the basic foundation for appropriating the world through play. It happens all by itself, from birth. This is meant by «implicit learning». Babies lie on their back, they feel free because their needs are catered for, and they start to play with their fingers. We don’t say to the baby, «now it would be good for your learning progress if you observed the play of your fingers.» Children continue to conquer their body by crawling, sitting up and pulling themselves up, falling and standing up again, walking, and later on by skipping, jumping and riding bikes. By the way, children mirror the social situations around them in the first years; they mirror the behaviour of adults and the environment. A child watering a plant is copying what an adult does. If I say to the child, «you must hold the watering can differently,» the child will say, «you must hold the watering can differently.» Children mirror actions, not content. How do you shape the transition from free play to tidying up in kindergarten? Instead of walking around with a little bell calling «tidy-up time», you start tidying up your work place, washing up, putting tables back in their place, drawing a curtain …
… in other words, you don’t explain …
… but I demonstrate and comment on the one or other activity in warm, pictorial language, for example: «Oh, it’s time for the truck to make its way back to the garage.» You need to create «pedagogical pull» rather than pedagogical pressure. The children notice: now we are tidying up, and they join in rather than being asked to do something. This is how learning happens: children resonate with what happens around them. Implicit learning is always resonant, imitative, based on discovery. There is no other way.
Everything is play at first: the onomatopoeic experiences in the first year, the finding of words in the second, along with bodily dexterity and the discovering of physical laws. Nothing is meaningless, everything is essential. Children resonate with their environment; they imitate and in doing so they discover and learn to understand the world.
Through the most diverse activities. Something needs to go on around children for them to resonate with, for them to discover. If children only see adults looking after children there is not much to imitate. Children become immobile, pale and cold when educators sit around writing, chatting or having coffee.
What kind of activities are right for children?
Waldorf kindergartens may sometimes come across as nostalgic or old-fashioned. But it is not nostalgia when they bake, comb wool, do gardening or craft activities. It’s not because things used to be better in the old days in large farming families. These activities enable a direct sensory connection with the surrounding world in which children can participate. They don’t only learn that, at the push of a button, the light comes on, the fridge, cooker, dishwasher start working, or that toys are bought in a shop. Instead, things are made transparent to them. We take the milk out of the coffee, as it were, and trace it back to the cow so that the world makes sense. Otherwise, children don’t know how carrots grow and how they get to the supermarket. We become mere users of a world that smart people have created for us. In Waldorf kindergartens children experience themselves as actively involved in these different activities.
Does this go back to Rudolf Steiner?
One of the few indications Steiner gave for kindergartens was in a lecture of 18 April 1923 (GA 306) where he suggested that educators should not walk from one child to the next, instructing them what to do but bring the activities of life in the kindergarten so they can flow into the child play. We see this in practice: when adults are baking or doing craft work and the children help them, this builds a bridge towards free play. When we involve children in sawing a thin slice off a branch and sanding it smooth, they have produced a coin to take to the shop where they can buy sugar or cheese … amazing what wood shavings can be used for! So much happens in that moment.
Thanks to many years of empirical research into salutogenesis carried out by the medical sociologist Aaron Antonovsky we have a solid conceptual foundation to lean on. When we experience what is going on in the world as meaningful, comprehensible and manageable – three factors Antonovsky identified as essential – we develop a strong sense of coherence, a strong connection between I and world. This can even be measured on a sense of coherence scale. The activities in Waldorf kindergartens correspond to this scale (or should do) in that they are meaningful, comprehensible and manageable. Life goes on around the children and, rather than being constantly told «you can’t do that yet», they can join in. This increases their sense of coherence and consequently their resilience. Human resilience depends on a sense of coherence.
To come back to the screen media: from what age can they be used?
Our ultimate aim is for young people to develop competence in dealing with technical devices and digital media, to develop the maturity to judge for themselves: what is good for me, when can I use this and when am I in danger of becoming addicted and had better stay away from it? We wouldn’t keep eating food that makes us ill. We would stop eating it. We aim at the same common sense with media use. We can therefore not ban media altogether until a certain age and then go from zero to a hundred. We need to achieve a media balance between the age of seven, eight, nine years – until then I would, based on my experience, recommend avoiding digital media – and early adulthood. We need to make children and young people acquainted with the media, speak with them about their experiences, explain that a laptop is a work tool – all these are things that children and adolescents need to learn, but we need to accompany them on this path.
I would be reluctant to specify a particular age, because situations differ from child to child, from family to family. We must also be open to compromises. After all, we wouldn’t forbid a child to go to a birthday party because sugar is bad for them. Sometimes it is better to accept something rather than turn it into a problem. I would not dream of telling others how to deal with these matters at home. Instead of complaining, we should improve our schools or kindergartens. Because that’s where we are responsible.
Anna-Katharina Dehmelt
Translated from German by Margot M. Saar
Philipp Gelitz, born 1981, has a PhD in education and a master’s degree in pedagogical practice research. He is a state-recognized educator and Waldorf educator and worked for 12 years in a Waldorf kindergarten in Kassel (Germany). He is a lecturer in childhood education and junior professor of Waldorf Early Childhood Education at the German Alanus University Alfter. His book publications include Frühe Kindheit verstehen. Pädagogik im Waldorfkindergarten (Understanding early childhood. The pedagogy of Waldorf kindergartens), Freies Geistesleben 2017, 131 pages, € 19.