Let Them Have Silence
Can we turn down the volume on childhood, please?
Children need silence. They need it to think, to listen, and to practice using their own voices, whether it’s talking or singing or just practicing making sounds. And I don’t think we give them enough of it.
I was reminded of this when I met a young father in town who stopped to chat about my book. He expressed approval for its digital minimalist message, then said his toddler doesn’t get much screen time, apart from a show called Ms. Rachel. “We like to have it on the TV in the background, since it’s good for literacy development,” he explained.
I’d heard the name, but I had to Google who Ms. Rachel was—a preschool teacher turned YouTube star. It looks like she’s very popular. But not knowing anything about her videos, I just felt sorry for the toddler being bombarded by a steady dose of digital noise emanating from a screen. It must get annoying, and yet the young child would be unable to articulate that or do anything about it. Wouldn’t you find it annoying?
Fewer Adult Words
The father’s words were curious. “Literacy development.” When did TV become a preferred way to teach kids about speech, vocabulary, and conversation? It doesn’t even appear to be all that effective. There is a fascinating study from 2009 that found that, for every hour of audible TV noise, between 500 and 1,000 fewer words are spoken by adults to children.
“Adults typically utter approximately 941 words per hour. Our study found that adult words are almost completely eliminated when television is audible to the child. These results may explain the association between infant television exposure and delayed language development,” said lead researcher Dmitri Christakis, MD, director of the Center for Child Health, Behavior, and Development at Seattle Children’s Research Institute.
Spoken and imitated words from caregivers are the absolute best. “There is simple nothing better for early childhood language acquisition,” say the researchers. And TV is a poor substitute. It actually “reduces the number of language sounds and words babies hear, vocalize and therefore learn,” which is why an increasingly technologized infancy “may prove harmful to the next generation of adults.”
It’s Even Louder Now
The technological landscape has changed drastically over 15 years, and now I’d say noise is even more prevalent. Thanks to portable devices, much of childhood these days is set to an incessant soundtrack. Kids are inundated with noise everywhere they go. Many well-meaning parents think of it as “stimulating,” and no doubt it is sometimes a very good thing. But I do believe we’re overdoing it.
Toy aisles are a cacophony of singing, buzzing, jingling electronic toys with buttons that beg, “Try me!” Kids are always bent over iPads or phones with apps blasting game sounds or tinny music. I see school-aged kids walking around outside with headphones, insulated from the world, presumably listening to music.
The noise exists even in schools. In my kids’ kindergarten classes, students were subjected to Disney movies at every lunch break, which was supposed to prevent them from acting rowdy, but instead prevented them from eating. Now they tell me about frequent YouTube videos blasting from the Smartboard at the front of the class, and my son tells me that most boys in his high school classes spend the whole day with one AirPod in, listening to explicit rap.
Why Kids Need Silence
To quote Susan Linn, author of Who’s Raising the Kids? Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children:
“Children’s opportunities for silence—to experience wonder but also to play, dream, and explore—are rare… Children need access to quiet times and spaces. Not only is incessant noise a threat to physical and psychological health, it is an internationally recognized form of torture. Silence enables children to find their own voice, and I mean that both literally and figuratively.”
A young child who is allowed to play in relative silence in a home, with non-electronic, open-ended toys, can make important vocalizations that are important precursors to vocabulary and speech. A child in a quiet room is highly attuned to whatever adult is nearby, ready to respond to the slightest indicator of engagement and also listening to what they’re saying to anyone else. They’re absorbing the cadence of intonation, sensing shifts in tone.
A child who’s playing in silence is also lost in thought. Even if much of it is subconscious, surely their little brain is whirring at a million miles a minute, trying to make sense of the world, testing ideas and limits, wondering what certain physical movements will do.
An older child sitting in silence will be able to focus better on homework, on reading, on thinking about events that have occurred that day or issues that might be weighing on them, and again, be more responsive to parental engagement. This matters greatly. Based on personal experience, I have realized that too much noise—even if it’s “good” noise like great music and interesting podcasts—gets in the way of deep thinking. It’s only when I turn everything off that I can actually make real sense of certain ideas.
It gets in the way of wonder, too, which Linn touched on. (See Wonder, an Antidote to Despair.) I have seen my kids crouched in the backyard in absolute silence, observing birds and baby bunnies and chipmunks close-up. If I make a sound, they put their fingers to their lips and remain frozen. I love seeing this because it shows me that they’ve learned one of the most important life lessons of all, that if you turn off the noise and sit very still and quietly, you’ll start to notice things about the world that you didn’t before.
Another mom told me about her child in the car on a road trip, staring out the window. She was about to pass him an iPad, “because I thought he was bored,” but then she resisted. And waited. And waited. And he kept staring out the window, humming softly, talking to himself. She never gave him the iPad, and he was just fine. She said she felt relieved. He probably learned more from that road trip than anything a series of flashy kids’ YouTube videos would have imparted.
Don’t be afraid of silence. Just let the kids be.
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Reader Feedback:
I was blown away by all the thoughtful and supportive emails I received after posting my last article, “Why I’m Skeptical About Warning Labels on Social Media.” Thank you to all who reached out, and to those who commented with such interesting observations.
One reader asked for families’ practical workarounds when it comes to letting kids connect with friends, i.e., an old-fashioned landline, etc., and the feedback was amazing. Please continue to share your own “analog hacks”, as I think this would make a valuable article in the near future.
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I am very frustrated by the lack of headphones for everyone lately, especially when people stick a device in front of a kid while in public. It's like they know you will never confront a kid who is "learning". I am always working on not judging other parents but it is really hard when you see a kid in a stroller or on the bus or at the park have a device put in their face the second they show any signs of discomfort.
My son is into the Oliver the Pig books right now and in one of the stories, Olive and his mother and sister bake cookies. His mother asks what they should do while they wait for the cookies to bake and Oliver says "Let's do nothing." They sit at the table and enjoy the silence together. Sometimes my son says that now in the kitchen and I just love doing "nothing" with him.
This is such a great article ! Open ended play is how our daughter spends a lot of her time in our living room and I love listening to her make up stories. It’s do interesting how they interpret the world around them!