About Your Privacy on this Site 
 
 Welcome! To bring you the best content on our sites and applications, Meredith partners with third party advertisers to serve digital ads, including personalized digital ads. Those advertisers use tracking technologies to collect information about your activity on our sites and applications and across the Internet and your other apps and devices. 
 
 You always have the choice to experience our sites without personalized advertising based on your web browsing activity by visiting the DAA’s Consumer Choice page, the NAI's website, and/or the EU online choices page, from each of your browsers or devices. To avoid personalized advertising based on your mobile app activity, you can install the DAA’s AppChoices app here. You can find much more information about your privacy choices in our privacy policy. Even if you choose not to have your activity tracked by third parties for advertising services, you will still see non-personalized ads on our site. 
 
 By clicking continue below and using our sites or applications, you agree that we and our third party advertisers can: 
 
 transfer your personal data to the United States or other countries, and 
 
 process your personal data to serve you with personalized ads, subject to your choices as described above and in our privacy policy. 
 
 EU Data Subject Requests ||||| THURSDAY, May 4, 2017 (HealthDay News) -- Letting a baby or toddler use a smartphone or tablet may lead to delays in talking, a new study suggests. 
 
 "Handheld devices are everywhere these days," said principal investigator Dr. Catherine Birken, a staff pediatrician and scientist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. 
 
 "While new pediatric guidelines suggest limiting screen time for babies and toddlers, we believe that the use of smartphones and tablets with young children has become quite common. This is the first study to report an association between handheld screen time and increased risk of expressive language delay," she said in an American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) news release. 
 
 Expressive language is the ability to convey feelings and information, according to the American Academy of Family Physicians. 
 
 The findings support a recent AAP policy recommendation to discourage any type of screen media in children younger than 18 months, Birken said. 
 
 The new research included nearly 900 children from Toronto, ages 6 months to 2 years. At their 18-month checkup, 20 percent of the children used handheld devices such as smartphones, tablets and electronic games an average of 28 minutes a day. 
 
 Birken and her team said that the more time a child spent on these devices, the more likely he or she would have delays in expressive speech. Specifically, for each 30-minute increase in handheld screen time, there was a 49 percent increased risk of expressive speech delay. 
 
 The researchers didn't find a link between use of these devices and other communication delays, such as social interaction, body language or gestures. 
 
 The current study did not prove a direct cause-and-effect link between the devices and speech delays. Further research is needed to learn more about the issue, the researchers concluded. 
 
 The study is scheduled to be presented Saturday at the Pediatric Academic Societies meeting, in San Francisco. Findings presented at meetings are generally viewed as preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal. 
 
 More information 
 
 The U.S. National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders has more on speech and language development.
– Time on a tablet may slow speech development in young children, new research shows. Pediatricians at the Hospital for Sick Children in Canada who examined the effect of screen time on 900 children between 6 months and 2 years old found a 49% increased risk of delayed speech for every additional 30 minutes spent using a touch screen, Time reports. While previous studies have reported negative effects associated with screen time, including sleeping problems, the research presented at the annual meeting of the Pediatric Academic Societies was the first to establish a link between handheld devices and expressive language delay. Expressive language refers to the ability to convey feelings and information, per the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). Screen time did not affect other types of communication, such as social interaction or body language. Led by Dr. Catherine Birken, the team found that by 18 months, one-fifth of the children studied used tablets, smartphones, or other handheld devices an average of 28 minutes a day. With devices "everywhere these days," Birken says in a news release that all screen time for children under 18 months should be discouraged, a suggestion echoed by the AAP. That even goes for apps marketed as educational. One expert tells Time that the littlest ones can't understand the connection between what they see on the screen and what they see in the real world. “Symbolic thinking and memory flexibility is something that apps haven’t been able to overcome, no matter how interactive they are," says Dr. Jenny Radesky. (This app can help grown-ups get smarter.)