LOS ANGELES (AP) — Every so often, Brandi
Koskie finds dozens of photos of her 3-year-old daughter, Paisley, on
her iPhone — but they aren’t ones Koskie has taken.
‘‘There'll be 90 pictures,
sideways, of the corner of her eye, her eyebrow,’’ said Koskie, who
lives in Wichita, Kan. ‘‘She’s just tapping her way right into my
phone.’’
The hidden photos, all shot by
Paisley, illustrate a phenomenon familiar to many parents in today’s
tech-savvy world: Toddlers love selfies. Observant entrepreneurs have
caught on to these image-obsessed tots, marketing special apps that make
taking photos super-easy for little fingers. You can even buy a pillow
with a smartphone pocket so toddlers can take selfies during a diaper
change.
But toddlers aren’t the only ones
taking photos nonstop. It’s not unusual for doting parents to snap
thousands of digital photos by the time their child is 2. Today’s
toddlers think nothing of finding their own biopic stored in a device
barely bigger than a deck of cards.
While the barrage of images may
keep distant grandparents happy, it’s not yet clear how such a steady
diet of self-affirming navel-gazing will affect members of the first
truly ‘‘smartphone generation.’’ Tot-centric snapshots can help build a
healthy self-image and boost childhood memories when handled correctly,
but shooting too many photos or videos and playing them back instantly
for a demanding toddler could backfire, said Deborah Best, a professor
of cognitive developmental psychology at Wake Forest University in
Winston-Salem, N.C.
The instant gratification that
smartphones provide today’s toddlers is ‘‘going to be hard to
overcome,’’ she said. ‘‘They like things immediately, and they like it
short and quick. It’s going to have an impact on kids’ ability to wait
for gratification. I can’t see that it won't.’’
Julie Young, a Boston-based
behavioral analyst, has seen that firsthand. She was recently helping
her 3-year-old son record a short birthday video for his cousin on her
iPhone when he stopped mid-sentence, lunged for her phone and shouted,
‘‘Mom, can I see it?’’
‘‘It’s caught on the end of the
video. He couldn’t even wait to get the last sentence out,’’ said Young,
who has two sons. ‘‘The second the phone comes out, they stop, they
look and they attack.’’
Now Young and her husband make
their sons wait to look at a new video or photo until after dinner or
until the other parent comes home, when everyone can watch together.
They are careful to sit with their kids when looking at photos and have
adopted the phrase ‘‘practice patience’’ as a family mantra.
It’s natural for toddlers to be
fascinated with their own image (think mirrors), and that interest plays
an important developmental role as they develop a sense of self, child
development experts say. Watching a video again and again can also help
move events from short- to long-term memory, Best said.
But like any other fun thing kids
get obsessed with, too much of it can be bad. Parents should make sure
some photos show the child with other family members or friends. Parents
can also sit with kids and narrate the photo or video as if it were a
bedtime story.
‘‘When we read a book to a child, it’s the same thing we do with these photos,’’ Best said.
Koskie has noticed that cuddling
in bed on a lazy Saturday morning and swiping through digital photos is
one of Paisley’s favorite activities, and it seems to encourage her to
ask about her place in the world. They look at photos and videos
together on the iPad going back to Paisley’s birth and ‘‘she'll start to
ask questions: ‘When I was a little tiny baby did I do this? Did I do
that?'’’
Paisley and the iPad are almost
the same age: She was born two weeks after it came out. ‘‘That’s a
base-level, foundation technology for her,’’ said Koskie, who handles
marketing and content strategy for the email app EvoMail. ‘‘Someday it’s
all going to come back to bite me or she’s going to come back and say,
‘Wow, there’s this whole encyclopedia of my whole life.’ We’re very
plugged in, for better or for worse.’’
Still, parents who remember the days before
iPhones wonder if their children will ever really understand the power
of a cherished photograph. Jason Michael, a 32-year-old father of two in
Denver, has taken so many photos of his 11-month-old son and 4-year-old
stepdaughter (about 4,000) that his iPhone’s memory has filled up three
times. His stepdaughter takes plenty of selfies and loves to film
herself singing favorite songs, then watches the videos again and again.
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