Zacharie Bishop wriggled around in his booster seat, gawking at the flurry of activity around him at a Vancouver restaurant.
As the two-year-old repeatedly stood up and sat back down, his mother, nibbling on an order of French toast, tried to distract him with crayons and scribble pad. No dice.
“Hey, do you want to watch a cartoon or play a game?” his father, Buzz Bishop, recounts asking.
“Yeah!” Zacharie chirped.
And then, as Mr. Bishop had done countless times before, he whipped out his iPhone and handed it to the toddler.
With ease, Zacharie used his nimble little fingers to navigate his way into the National Film Board application and play The Cat Came Back video. Captivated by the animation, he sat quietly in an iTrance for the rest of the meal.
“You don't want to do the screen time, but restaurants with two-year-olds are nasty if the food's not there in four minutes,” said Mr. Bishop.
Where puzzles, books and analog toys fail, the iPhone has become the best on-the-go pacifier for a new legion of tech-savvy parents. The market has grown quickly: Four of the top 10 best-selling education apps in the iTunes store are designed for under-4s.
Mr. Bishop and other iParents have faced judgment from those who opt for more traditional (and far cheaper) toys for their children, and advocacy groups, concerned about the rapid technologization of childhood.
But there are also positive verdicts: Some researchers laud iPhones as “any time, anywhere” educational tools. And they can be useful distractions for harried parents.
In 2006, WestEd, a non-profit educational research centre based in San Francisco, equipped 80 parents of three- and four-year-olds with mobile phones loaded with literacy-themed video lessons in a PBS KIDS-commissioned study. For eight weeks, the children were taught the alphabet from a mobile-screen-sized Elmo and parents were asked to watch 26 corresponding “literacy tips” for incorporating learning about the alphabet at home. After the study's completion, more than three-quarters of parents said that mobile devices could be used as effective learning tools to a “good extent” or “great extent.”
Participants repeatedly praised the portability of the application, said Jodie Hoffman, a research assistant at WestEd. Parents with full-time jobs and a household to run sometimes don't have the luxury of sitting down at home for a dedicated hour of one-on-one time with their kid.
“To have it on a medium that is with them all the time, with a program that they have faith in [was key],” said Ms. Hoffman.
When Alexandra Samuel decided to upgrade to a new iPhone, she handed down her old model to her three-year-old son and six-year-old daughter. But the Vancouver mom is a little nervous about the optics of equipping her offspring with such a flashy gadget.
“I've told [my daughter] to tell people she has an iPod Touch because [the phone] it sounds ridiculously indulgent. I'm self-conscious about people thinking I bought my daughter a $600 device.” (The iPod Touch runs from about $200 to $400, not exactly cheap either.) But she says the iPhone is actually a more economical tool for kids since almost all the apps she gets for her three-year-old are either free or only a dollar, whereas many console games can cost upwards of $30.
“I thought, ‘Wow, how much of a sucker would I have to be to buy a console where the games have zero educational value in most cases?” she said. But some experts say that whether on the iPhone or on a console, the benefits of electronic games can be over-hyped.
While the iTunes store is brimming with thousands of apps that claim to teach toddlers to read, write and count, pediatrician Dimitri Christakis is skeptical about their effectiveness.
