The issue of exposing or not exposing the youngest of our house to devices equipped with touch screens is, to say the least, controversial. At this point the experts do not agree and there are opinions in every sense. Following a study recently published by the newspaper Frontiers in Psychology, it is shown that having a young child use devices equipped with touch screens correlates with a greater control of fine motor skills.
However, this does not mean that we should completely change our perception regarding its use since, the most widespread opinion holds, instead, that the use of touch screens at an early age can delay cognitive development, in fact, is the opinion held by the American Academy of Pediatrics, an institution that, in turn, advises not expose our children to screens before the age of two, a guideline that similar agencies in different countries have adopted.
Touchscreens are still too novel a technology for relevant and in-depth studies to exist
As you can see, we have opinions for everything and, the most curious thing about the whole matter is that neither of the hypotheses is supported by the data collected from an investigation, so we can consider both as an automatic reaction to a new technology rather than as one informed health strategy since, because the technology in touchscreens is too recent, scientists have not yet had a chance to study in depth the relationship between childhood development and the use of touch screens.
As a detail, tell you that according to the study carried out by Dr Tim J Smith, from the University of London, in which a total of 715 families participated, apparently today 51,22% of babies between 6 and 11 months of age have daily exposure to touch screens, a figure that increases to 92,05% when the child's age is between 19 and 36 months. In principle, the results did not show significant associations between the use of mobile devices and children's development, although it was found that Babies 19-36 months who were able to actively scroll across the screen also learned to stack blocks first, a measure of fine motor control.