Author: MIL-OSI Publisher

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Olga Fotakopoulou, Associate Professor in Developmental Psychology, Birmingham City University

New UK government guidance recommends that screen time for children under two should be avoided, except for shared activities such as video calls. For children aged two to five, a maximum of an hour a day is suggested. The guidance also outlines that watching screens together is better than children viewing alone.

This echoes guidance from the World Health Organization recommending no screen time for infants under two, and no more than one hour per day for older children aged four and under.

The early years, especially from birth to age six, are a critical period for developing social and communication skills. This is when children are learning how to connect with others, communicate their needs and understand the signals people give them. Given the increasing presence of touchscreen technologies in young children’s environments, understanding how these tools influence early developmental trajectories is essential.

Touchscreen technology offers new opportunities for learning and play. But there are also questions about its impact on children’s social development, communication and school readiness. Researchers and health organisations have been working to consider how digital media interacts with children’s development and shapes their early experiences.

Excessive touchscreen use has been associated with delays in expressive language, reduced attention spans, and poorer interactions between parents and children.

Yet the picture is not one-sided. My research with colleagues highlights that early exposure to multi-modal technologies – tools that combine sound, images, touch and movement – can shape children’s social development in both positive and negative ways.

Language skills and collaboration

On the positive side, interactive and engaging uses of technology can foster language development. Studies show that digital platforms encouraging storytelling, role play and collaborative activities can enhance children’s competence in communication.

Touchscreens can also help children to work together on shared tasks. Multi-touch interfaces promote joint problem-solving, turn-taking and dialogue. This can strengthen cooperation and peer relationships.

In classrooms, tablets often become focal points for group activities. Children share knowledge, assist one another and collaborate on projects, which can enhance social interaction skills and confidence.

Touchscreens also create opportunities for social play and communication across distance. Video-communication apps such as Skype and FaceTime allow children to maintain relationships with family and friends, supporting emotional bonds and social connection.

Creative expression is another area where digital tools can shine. Drawing, animation, and storytelling apps encourage children to share ideas and collaborate. This can promote cooperation and social bonding.

Passive use

However, these benefits coexist with significant challenges. Excessive screen time can reduce opportunities for face-to-face interaction, limiting children’s practice of conversational skills and emotional understanding. When children use screens passively or in isolation, they may become less engaged in socialising with others.

Parents’s use of screens is another concern. When parents are absorbed in their own devices, they talk less with their children. This reduces opportunities for educationally meaningful conversations.

Touchscreen use can also affect communication more directly. Studies show that electronic books may shift parents’ attention toward the device rather than the story, displacing meaningful conversation and reducing the quality of shared reading experiences. Some research suggests that heavy touchscreen use may make it harder for children to pick up social and emotional cues. This may affect their ability to decode social situations.

Importantly, the impact of touchscreen use is shaped by several mediating factors. Children learn more effectively when adults or their classmates model how to use touchscreen devices. As the government guidance states, it’s also better if adults watch screens together with their child, rather than their child watching alone.

Parents’ views and wider culture matter too. In research I carried out with colleagues, we found that cultural perceptions about what makes a good childhood shaped parents’ choices. In Portugal and Norway, strong cultural emphasis on outdoor play, social interaction, and connection with nature led parents to prioritise these activities over touchscreen use.

These cultural expectations influence how parents interpret and regulate young children’s digital practices, showing that attitudes toward technology are closely tied to wider national discourses about childhood. Educational settings further influence this. The way technology is integrated into classrooms can reinforce social behaviour.

These findings have important implications for school readiness. Social communication skills, such as turn-taking, listening, expressing ideas, and understanding others, are foundational for success in early education. Touchscreens can support these skills when used interactively and collaboratively. But when screen use replaces conversation, imaginative play or peer interaction, it may hinder the development of the very abilities children need for school and their social lives.

The evidence suggests that the question is not whether children should use touchscreens, but how. High-quality, interactive, and socially supported digital experiences can enrich development. Passive or excessive use can undermine it.

However, it’s vital to recognise that not all digital content is created equal. The quality and context of technology use can have a significant impact. As digital technologies continue to evolve, ensuring that young children’s screen experiences are balanced, meaningful, and socially engaging will be essential.

I have received funding from EU and Nuffield Foundation (but not for this project).

– ref. UK government recommends maximum one hour of screen time for younger children: what the evidence says – https://theconversation.com/uk-government-recommends-maximum-one-hour-of-screen-time-for-younger-children-what-the-evidence-says-275752

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Justin Stebbing, Professor of Biomedical Sciences, Anglia Ruskin University

Women’s HRT patches can treat prostate cancer just as effectively as standard hormone injections – but with fewer of the worst side-effects – according to a large UK trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The finding could change how men with prostate cancer that has spread beyond the gland are treated for years to come.

Standard treatment has long relied on shutting down testosterone, the fuel that drives many tumours, through regular injections that turn off the body’s own hormone production. They are effective, but they are blunt tools, dragging down oestrogen as well as testosterone and taking a heavy toll on quality of life with hot flushes, brittle bones and metabolic problems. Now, in an elegant twist of biology, the very hormone patches used to ease menopause symptoms in women are being repurposed to treat prostate cancer in men.

The idea sounds counterintuitive at first. Why would giving oestrogen to men help control a cancer fed by testosterone? The answer lies in feedback loops.

Oestradiol, the form of oestrogen in standard HRT patches, signals to the brain that there is plenty of sex hormone around. The brain then dials down its instructions to the testes to make testosterone, so levels of the male hormone fall just as effectively as with injections designed to switch production off directly. In other words, you can arrive at the same hormonal destination by a more subtle route.

In the new trial, more than 1,300 men, with an average age of about 72, were randomly allocated to either the standard hormone injections or to skin patches delivering oestradiol, identical to those used for menopausal symptoms. Many also received radiotherapy and sometimes chemotherapy, reflecting how these cancers are treated in routine practice.

After three years, the proportion of men alive without the cancer progressing was almost identical in the two groups: 87% in the patch arm and 86% with injections. Essentially, a dead heat for effectiveness.

Where the approaches really diverged was in how men felt. Because injections strip away oestrogen as well as testosterone, they create a kind of sudden “male menopause”, complete with hot flushes, night sweats and thinning bones.

In the trial, almost nine in ten men on injections reported hot flushes. Among those wearing patches, less than half did.

Bone health also favoured the patches, with fractures roughly twice as common in the injection group. Men on patches, however, paid a different price: more than 80% developed breast tissue swelling, compared with about 40% of those on injections. This gynaecomastia, as it’s called, is rarely dangerous, but it can be very uncomfortable and for some men deeply unwelcome.

Those trade-offs go to the heart of modern cancer care. It is no longer enough just to count years of survival. As more people live for longer with their disease controlled, the quality of those years matters just as much. Prostate cancer is already the most common cancer in UK men, with around 64,000 new cases and 12,000 deaths each year.

Many of those men will spend years on hormone therapy. If two treatments tame the tumour equally well, the one that lets you sleep through the night without wrestling with hot flushes, preserves your bones and can be applied at home rather than in a clinic starts to look very attractive.

The practical advantages of patches are easy to appreciate. Injections require repeated trips to hospital or GP surgeries and can be painful. Patches are simply stuck on the skin and replaced at home, with oestradiol absorbed steadily into the bloodstream.

This “transdermal” delivery – through the skin rather than the stomach – avoids the liver processing the hormone and appears to blunt some of the heart and clotting risks historically linked to oestrogen tablets taken by mouth. That is important because earlier attempts decades ago to treat prostate cancer with oestrogen pills fell out of favour when they were linked to more heart attacks and strokes. The current research essentially resurrects that old idea with a safer formulation and route.

The trial is part of a broader shift towards re-examining assumptions in oncology. For years, the focus in prostate cancer has been on newer, more targeted drugs and immunotherapies. Yet here we have a relatively cheap, widely available hormone patch being asked to do double duty: easing menopausal symptoms in one half of the population and quietly disabling a common male cancer in the other.

It is a reminder that innovation is not always about glamorous new molecules. Sometimes it is about taking an existing tool and using human physiology more cleverly.

None of this means that injections will vanish. For some men, breast swelling from patches may be intolerable despite the benefits. For others, the familiarity and simplicity of a regular injection still appeals. There will also be questions about which patients are best suited to this approach, how it interacts with newer generations of hormonal drugs and whether long-term effects on the heart remain reassuring.

Regulatory approval is still needed

Regulators will need to approve oestradiol patches specifically for prostate cancer, not just menopause, before health systems such as the NHS can routinely offer them in this way. Cost-effectiveness analyses and real-world data will follow.

What the study does immediately is widen the menu of choices. Instead of a single standard hormone therapy pathway, men with prostate cancer may soon be able to sit down with their doctors and weigh the trade-offs in a more personal way: fewer hot flushes and better bones with a high chance of breast swelling, or more traditional injections with their own set of problems. That conversation may feel more like choosing between HRT options in the menopause clinic than the old, paternalistic model of cancer care where one default protocol is imposed.

It is also a striking example of how women’s health and men’s health intersect. For years, debates around HRT have focused on its risks and benefits for women navigating menopause, with strong views on both sides. Now, the same patches are being recast as a potential life-prolonging treatment for men.

It is hard not to see a poetic symmetry there: a therapy designed to buffer women from the hormonal upheavals of midlife, helping men withstand the hormonal upheaval we deliberately induce to control prostate cancer. As more evidence accumulates, the humdrum little square of adhesive on the skin may come to symbolise a new, gentler chapter in how we use hormones against one of our most common cancers.

Justin Stebbing does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. HRT patches to treat prostate cancer – here’s how it works – https://theconversation.com/hrt-patches-to-treat-prostate-cancer-heres-how-it-works-279346

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Luke McGuire, Senior Lecturer, Department of Psychology, University of Exeter

Eating meat and other animal products can have negative effects on our health, the environment and animal welfare.

Eating a more plant-based diet rich in wholefoods could prevent 27% of human deaths worldwide, according to the EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy, sustainable, and just food systems. It could also spare the lives of more than 80 billion animals a year and cause 75% less environmental damage.

While some European governments, such as Denmark, are introducing legislation that incentivises citizens to buy and eat plant-based food, progress is slow. That is partly due to the difficulty in changing adults’ minds about meat.

However, our new study shows that young people might be more open to ditching meat. We asked more than 1,000 young adults in the UK (with an average age of 23) whether they had thought about stopping eating meat when they were still at school. Half of our participants (48.5%) said they had thought about this. Surprisingly, 50.4% of those participants actually did stop eating meat for some period of time.

This finding opens a range of possibilities for encouraging and supporting people to eat more sustainably.

If the childhood and teenage years are a window when lots of people are already questioning what they eat, an important next step is to understand how schools, councils and peer groups can support those young people who are interested in trying to eat healthier, more ethical and sustainable diets.

In our study, we asked 1,063 young adults from the UK whether they had ever thought about stopping eating meat during childhood (up until the end of secondary school). Of the participants who said they had thought about stopping, half of this group (50.4%) did stop for days (15.3%), weeks (17.1%), months (20.7%), years (21.5%) or permanently (25.5%).

In a follow-up survey, we asked 461 young adults (all of whom said they had thought about stopping eating meat when they were younger) to tell us more about their experiences.

We wanted to know why people first thought about stopping eating meat. Participants had a range of reasons – some talked about feeling disgusted by meat, others had a “meat epiphany” where they realised where meat came from. We also wanted to know if there was anything that explained why some young people were able to stop. We found that parental support was key – it was more important than all the other psychological factors we looked at, including people’s attitudes towards animals and their disgust towards meat.

We also found that most of the young people who had stopped eating meat during their school years returned to eating it (89.5%) at some later stage. This was for a range of reasons. Some stated that they had concerns for their health, others missed the taste of meat. Many talked about not wanting to cause an inconvenience to their family. They told us that their friends, schools and parents were all more supportive of them when they wanted to start eating meat again compared to when they had first stopped.

These findings suggest promising avenues for encouraging people to eat more sustainably. Our results suggest that a lot of people might already be thinking about reducing their meat intake when they’re young.

To do so, those who don’t have as much autonomy over their food choices need the support of their parents and schools. Many participants said that their new diet was an inconvenience for their family. This suggests that one place to offer support is in the family home. Understanding ways of teaching families to cook meals that can be easily adapted to meet their children’s dietary and nutritional requirements, without breaking the bank, could make a huge difference.

Cost is another important concern for families in this case. While research has shown that plant-based meat imitation products can be more expensive than their animal-based equivalents, on average shoppers spend less on a whole foods plant-based grocery shop than an animal-based trolley.

Healthy options

Some parents may worry that plant-based diets aren’t healthy for children and teenagers. However, research shows that carefully planned plant-based diets can support healthy living at every age and provide a diversity of dietary fibres important for gut health. In a recent review examining ten studies with more than 1,500 children, medical experts determined there is not enough evidence to say that vegan diets have negative effects on health, and that vegan children’s growth and nutrition was similar to that of omnivorous children.

However, dietary experts note that some key nutrients (such as iron, vitamin B12, vitamin D, calcium) essential for healthy development of tissues, metabolic and immune function and bone health, are naturally low in plant sources. As such plant-based diets and intake in young people should be monitored by health professionals. In spite of this, research has shown that shifting from a typical western diet to a more plant-based diet rich in wholefoods from the age of 20 could add a decade to life expectancy.

One limitation with our study is that we asked young adults to think back to their childhood. These kinds of retrospective methods aren’t perfect, as people sometimes mis-remember details from the past. An important next step will be to ask children and teenagers today what they think about this issue right now.

Despite this limitation, we think these findings offer a promising opportunity for anyone interested in supporting young people to advocate for themselves, the planet and other animals.

Luke McGuire receives funding from the ESRC.

Natalia Lawrence receives funding from the BBSRC (Diet and Health Open Innovation Research Club)

– ref. Young people more open to ditching meat than previously thought – new study – https://theconversation.com/young-people-more-open-to-ditching-meat-than-previously-thought-new-study-277567

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Michael Semple, Visiting Research Professor, The Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace Security and Justice, Queen’s University Belfast

Pakistan has been at war with Afghanistan’s Taliban regime for just under one month. Yet the conflict, which was officially declared by Pakistan the day before the US and Israel launched their strikes on Iran, has been overshadowed by events in the Gulf.

Pakistan and the Taliban have made widely differing claims regarding the numbers of people killed on either side. The rising casualty toll only briefly captured global attention when a Pakistani airstrike hit a drug rehabilitation centre in Kabul on March 16, killing more than 100 people.

But the three weeks of fighting, with a brief pause for the Eid al-Fitr holiday between March 20 and 23, confirm for anyone who still doubted it, that the schism between Pakistan and the Taliban is real. Of course there are complex geopolitical and regional interests at play. India provides some support for the Taliban while China tries to balance its alliance with Pakistan and its more tentative relationship with the Taliban. But the conflict tells us more about the politics of the Taliban movement itself and its relationship with Pakistan.

The Taliban are happy to exploit the spectacle of the conflict with Pakistan as their latest bid for legitimacy. They pose to the Afghan population as defenders of national sovereignty. And they believe that their guerrilla tactics give them an advantage in ground fighting against what they disparagingly refer to as the “Punjabi army”. Meanwhile, their ideology, which is based on religious zeal tinged with nationalism, plays to historical Afghan ideas around resisting foreigners, including the defeat of the British Army of the Indus in the 1838-42 war, is a potent recruiting tool.

Pakistani militants

The Pakistani Taliban (TTP) are the key factor behind the breakdown in Afghanistan’s relations with Pakistan. The TTP are a group of Pakistani militants, inspired by the Afghan Taliban, but with their own leadership and structure. The Afghan Taliban have provided a haven in Afghanistan to the TTP that mirrors the refuge they themselves received in Pakistan until 2021.

In the run up to the latest war, the TTP escalated their insurgency against the Pakistan state. Now TTP leaders have declared themselves a part of the Taliban’s emirate. They claim to be fighting to impose the Taliban version of the emirate on the whole of Pakistan, not just the tribal areas of the frontier, where the TTP originated.

This may help Pakistan persuade other regional powers that the Taliban pose a threat to stability analogous to that posed by Iran – but with IEDs and suicide bombers instead of ballistic missiles and drones. The problem for the Pakistan army is that neither previous efforts at containment of the Taliban nor the current limited aerial campaign against them has made the extremist regime amenable to cooperation.

Building grievance

For years, the Taliban were widely denigrated as a proxy force that had been created and supported by Pakistan and served Islamabad’s interests. This is simply wrong. The Taliban as a movement is rooted in Afghan culture and history, dominated by conservative Sunni clerics and madrassah (Islamic school) students from the Kandahari branches of Afghanistan’s Pashtun tribes. It was these tribes’ 18th-century rebellions against their Persian overlords which led to the emergence of modern Afghanistan. For three decades the movement has pursued a vision of imposing the Taliban’s Islamic system on Afghanistan.

They only accepted safe haven in Pakistan because they saw it as their best chance of outlasting the US intervention in Afghanistan.

The Taliban never felt much gratitude towards their hosts. Instead they accumulated grievances against their benefactors during the safe haven period. These grievances started soon after 9/11, when Pakistan helped the US detain numerous Taliban leaders. By August 2021 the Taliban had a pantheon of senior figures whose deaths they blamed on Pakistan – such as their former defence minister Obaidullah Akhund in 2010 and their second leader Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansoor in 2016.

When the Taliban leaders and security chiefs returned to government in Afghanistan in 2021, they were still nursing these grievances. As a result they have adopted policies to reduce Pakistan’s influence in their country. Taliban with families and assets in Pakistan were pressurised to repatriate them to Afghanistan. They have also redirected Afghanistan’s trade so that, by 2025, Iran had replaced Pakistan as the main source of Afghanistan’s imports. Meanwhile India has replaced it as the main destination for Afghan exports.

Since taking power, the Taliban have built their insurgent fighters into coherent national security forces – but forces that are subject to intense religious indoctrination. Anticipating the current conflict, they built a series of underground storage facilities for weaponry and to shelter their leaders if required. For now, they rely on vehicle-mounted heavy machine guns as air defence, but they continue trying to acquire more advanced capabilities, for example by showing up at Russian arms exhibitions.

Risk of escalation

If the Taliban were dancing to Islamabad’s tune, they would have answered Pakistan’s call to help deal with the TTP insurgency. Instead, the Taliban has sheltered the TTP allowing them to conduct attacks against Pakistan, despite repeated Pakistani protests and airstrikes against TTP targets in Afghanistan.

But in the fighting since the end of February, Pakistan has escalated from bombing the “guests”“ – TTP targets in Afghanistan – to bombing the “hosts” – the Afghan Taliban. So Afghanistan’s Taliban government has escalated by openly sending Afghan fighters across the border.

The war in the Persian Gulf rapidly overshadowed the Taliban’s war with Pakistan. But that does not diminish the potential for serious consequences from the latest twist in Afghanistan’s conflict. By openly allying themselves with a movement which seeks the overthrow of Pakistan’s government, the Taliban pose a threat to the stability of the second most populous Muslim majority state – a country with a nuclear arsenal.

And this, in turn, increases pressure on the Pakistan army to expand its campaign against the Taliban, contemplating regime change if the regime cannot be reformed. But regime change would require an alternative to the Taliban, which does not currently exist. This suggests that achieving Pakistan’s objectives will require more ambition than yet seen in the air campaign.

Michael Semple has received European and UK government funding for his research on the Taliban

– ref. What’s behind Pakistan’s war with Afghanistan’s Taliban government? – https://theconversation.com/whats-behind-pakistans-war-with-afghanistans-taliban-government-277105

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Manjeet Ridon, Associate Dean International, Faculty of Arts, Design & Humanities, De Montfort University

Colm Tóibín’s latest collection of short stories delivers a quietly powerful collection of nine stories that traverse Ireland, Spain, Argentina and the US. The News from Dublin offers intimate portraits of people shaped by history, disappointment, tragedy, grief and the long shadows of secrecy. These narratives favour restraint over spectacle, revealing emotional truths through subtle gestures, silences and missed connections.

Several stories are rooted in Ireland’s past, foregrounding families and communities under pressure. The Journey to Galway, set during the first world war, follows a mother travelling by train to deliver the telegram announcing her son’s death to his wife, and the impact of the war on the home front.

The drama lies not in external events but in her internal reckoning with grief, duty and the weight of carrying devastating news that will shatter the lives of her family and grandchildren. Tóibín’s spare prose mirrors the emotional austerity of the moment, highlighting how tragedy reverberates through ordinary lives.

A Sum of Money similarly explores Irish social realities, focusing on poverty and moral ambiguity. The young protagonist’s thefts at a religious boarding school are portrayed with empathy rather than condemnation, revealing how deprivation and shame can warp childhood.

The muted reaction when he is discovered and expelled from the school underscores a recurring motif in the collection: the unsaid, the unresolved, and the quiet accommodation of wrongdoing within institutions and families.

In the titular story, The News from Dublin, a schoolteacher’s attempt to navigate the complexities of local politics to secure experimental treatment for his sick brother results in him returning home unable to deliver the much hoped-for news. The absence of “news” is itself the story’s emotional climax, reflecting the moral complexities of familial duty, disappointment and avoidance.

Beyond Ireland, Tóibín examines themes of migration and displacement. Five Bridges follows an undocumented Irish immigrant in San Francisco returning to Ireland after three decades in the US.

His last weekend with his American daughter becomes a poignant reckoning with belonging, fatherhood and the precarity of immigrant life, framed against the spectre of contemporary US immigration raids and law enforcement under Donald Trump’s second term as president. The story captures the solidarity and belonging of diasporic and expatriate communities living precarious lives.

Sleep and Barton Springs delve into grief and sexuality with subtlety. In Sleep, a gay man’s relationship with his lover falters under the strain of his unresolved grief about his deceased brother, prompting a journey back to Dublin for therapy. The story delicately probes how cultural identity shapes the articulation of pain and trauma.

Barton Springs, the shortest story in the collection, also concerns a man grieving the death of his brother and offers a fleeting, sensuous moment of connection amid grief when one swimmer is transfixed in admiration of the physical beauty of another.

The Spanish stories in the collection introduce broader political and historical dimensions. Summer of ’38, narrated by an elderly Marta, reflects on a youthful affair during the Spanish civil war and the lifelong consequences of concealed parentage. Her silence about her daughter’s father encapsulates the collection’s recurring tension between truth and secrecy.

A Free Man, set in Barcelona, is perhaps the most unsettling story: an Irish ex-prisoner unrepentant about his crimes attempts to establish a new life in Spain free from detection. The narrative forces readers to confront moral discomfort without offering easy judgement, echoing biblical and existential motifs.

The collection concludes with The Catalan Girls, a novella-length story that presents a richly layered family saga centred on three sisters whose lives unfold across Spain and Argentina. Narrated from the perspective of the youngest sister, Montse, the story examines sisterhood, sibling rivalry, family poverty and the fragile formation of female identity in patriarchal societies.

The story ends with Montse stealing her sister’s Spanish passport so that she may have a life of independence and financial freedom away from her sisters. This act of betrayal becomes a powerful symbol of her self-preservation and defiance.

Across these stories, Tóibín returns to recurring themes: the burdens of history, the complexities of family and sexuality, the scars of poverty and migration, and the quiet tragedies of withheld truths. His prose is measured, empathetic and unsentimental, allowing readers to inhabit moral grey zones without overt authorial judgement.

The News from Dublin emerges as a complex collection of family histories and profound interior lives, rendered with quiet precision and emotional intelligence, and a set of stories that resonate strongly with contemporary political and social concerns.

Manjeet Ridon does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. The News from Dublin: Colm Tóibín’s latest short story collection resonates with emotional truth – https://theconversation.com/the-news-from-dublin-colm-toibins-latest-short-story-collection-resonates-with-emotional-truth-276230

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Olga Fotakopoulou, Associate Professor in Developmental Psychology, Birmingham City University

New UK government guidance recommends that screen time for children under two should be avoided, except for shared activities such as video calls. For children aged two to five, a maximum of an hour a day is suggested. The guidance also outlines that watching screens together is better than children viewing alone.

This echoes guidance from the World Health Organization recommending no screen time for infants under two, and no more than one hour per day for older children aged four and under.

The early years, especially from birth to age six, are a critical period for developing social and communication skills. This is when children are learning how to connect with others, communicate their needs and understand the signals people give them. Given the increasing presence of touchscreen technologies in young children’s environments, understanding how these tools influence early developmental trajectories is essential.

Touchscreen technology offers new opportunities for learning and play. But there are also questions about its impact on children’s social development, communication and school readiness. Researchers and health organisations have been working to consider how digital media interacts with children’s development and shapes their early experiences.

Excessive touchscreen use has been associated with delays in expressive language, reduced attention spans, and poorer interactions between parents and children.

Yet the picture is not one-sided. My research with colleagues highlights that early exposure to multi-modal technologies – tools that combine sound, images, touch and movement – can shape children’s social development in both positive and negative ways.

Language skills and collaboration

On the positive side, interactive and engaging uses of technology can foster language development. Studies show that digital platforms encouraging storytelling, role play and collaborative activities can enhance children’s competence in communication.

Touchscreens can also help children to work together on shared tasks. Multi-touch interfaces promote joint problem-solving, turn-taking and dialogue. This can strengthen cooperation and peer relationships.

In classrooms, tablets often become focal points for group activities. Children share knowledge, assist one another and collaborate on projects, which can enhance social interaction skills and confidence.

Touchscreens also create opportunities for social play and communication across distance. Video-communication apps such as Skype and FaceTime allow children to maintain relationships with family and friends, supporting emotional bonds and social connection.

Creative expression is another area where digital tools can shine. Drawing, animation, and storytelling apps encourage children to share ideas and collaborate. This can promote cooperation and social bonding.

Passive use

However, these benefits coexist with significant challenges. Excessive screen time can reduce opportunities for face-to-face interaction, limiting children’s practice of conversational skills and emotional understanding. When children use screens passively or in isolation, they may become less engaged in socialising with others.

Parents’s use of screens is another concern. When parents are absorbed in their own devices, they talk less with their children. This reduces opportunities for educationally meaningful conversations.

Touchscreen use can also affect communication more directly. Studies show that electronic books may shift parents’ attention toward the device rather than the story, displacing meaningful conversation and reducing the quality of shared reading experiences. Some research suggests that heavy touchscreen use may make it harder for children to pick up social and emotional cues. This may affect their ability to decode social situations.

Importantly, the impact of touchscreen use is shaped by several mediating factors. Children learn more effectively when adults or their classmates model how to use touchscreen devices. As the government guidance states, it’s also better if adults watch screens together with their child, rather than their child watching alone.

Parents’ views and wider culture matter too. In research I carried out with colleagues, we found that cultural perceptions about what makes a good childhood shaped parents’ choices. In Portugal and Norway, strong cultural emphasis on outdoor play, social interaction, and connection with nature led parents to prioritise these activities over touchscreen use.

These cultural expectations influence how parents interpret and regulate young children’s digital practices, showing that attitudes toward technology are closely tied to wider national discourses about childhood. Educational settings further influence this. The way technology is integrated into classrooms can reinforce social behaviour.

These findings have important implications for school readiness. Social communication skills, such as turn-taking, listening, expressing ideas, and understanding others, are foundational for success in early education. Touchscreens can support these skills when used interactively and collaboratively. But when screen use replaces conversation, imaginative play or peer interaction, it may hinder the development of the very abilities children need for school and their social lives.

The evidence suggests that the question is not whether children should use touchscreens, but how. High-quality, interactive, and socially supported digital experiences can enrich development. Passive or excessive use can undermine it.

However, it’s vital to recognise that not all digital content is created equal. The quality and context of technology use can have a significant impact. As digital technologies continue to evolve, ensuring that young children’s screen experiences are balanced, meaningful, and socially engaging will be essential.

I have received funding from EU and Nuffield Foundation (but not for this project).

– ref. UK government recommends maximum two hours of screen time for younger children: what the evidence says – https://theconversation.com/uk-government-recommends-maximum-two-hours-of-screen-time-for-younger-children-what-the-evidence-says-275752