A campaign calling on parents to keep young children away from screens: we are all for it, but when such a campaign is launched by Google and Amazon, we get worried. You probably think this is science fiction? Well, it is not. In the United States, the movement is under way. To protect our children? Not quite: to sell the new alternative to screens, voice assistants such as Alexa and Google Home. With them, no more keyboard, no more mouse, no more remote control, and not even any more apps! Google and Amazon have seized on the anti-screen discourse to present themselves as the best companions for our children. But are their conversational robots suitable for every pair of hands?
A very marketing-driven anti-screen campaign
According to their manufacturers, voice assistants are the virtuous alternative to the risk of passivity created by screens. Unlike screens, they supposedly “encourage interaction” by offering both varied entertainment and educational content suited to a young audience. It is true that, to that end, they offer nearly a hundred activities: stories to listen to, starting with fairy tales; activities such as quizzes and interactive question-and-answer games; and even games, such as musical chairs. These services are sometimes offered in partnership with companies that specialise in entertainment for young audiences, such as Disney. But what kind of “interactivity” are we talking about?
In fact, these campaigns offer exactly what we have been hearing since 2006 about the supposed benefits of television programmes for babies. Their argument centres on “active interaction” with the conversational robot, while completely ignoring the importance of multisensory interaction in young children. “By playing a game with an adult using a voice-activated device, the child is not focused on a screen; this encourages them to look around and pay attention to others,” writes Google. The picture is idyllic. These machines, designed to keep children occupied, will quickly become their new babysitters, and they will no more encourage bodily motor skills, the use of the hands as tools for grasping, familiarisation with facial expressions, or the ability to concentrate on a task on one’s own initiative than screens do.
In addition, other problems arise that Google and Amazon take care not to mention. Studies carried out by Amazon have already shown that many users of conversational robots tell their machine that they have a secret to confide. Alexa is not programmed to refuse, but to answer: “OK”. This desire to confide will probably be shared by children as much as by adults. But what will these machines do with all these secrets?
Moreover, there is no barrier when it comes to the voice. A computer only records what is typed in; a conversational robot captures everything that is said around it, even if it is not the intended recipient of the exchange. Nor is there any accessible browsing history that would let us see what we said, sometimes without thinking much about it, or what our child said, so that we could modify or delete it if need be. Shouldn’t the conversational robot be coupled with a screen and a printer so that what has been recorded can be viewed?
Finally, there is no parental control over voice recognition either: a three-year-old can give family information to a conversational robot, which passes it on to its manufacturer. A child can even buy items once the parents have entered their bank card number, which has been stored by the provider, since you must have an Amazon account in order to have Alexa.
New battles ahead
The risk of these tools is not that children will be unable to tell humans from electronic devices, as people sometimes worry. It is that they make children dependent on an interactive object in their discovery of the world, so that they get used to depending, exactly as with screens, even if in a different way, on a machine that calls out to them rather than organising their exploration of the environment at their own pace and according to their own desire to discover. That is why today’s fight against the dangers of screens must not stress their supposed harmfulness, but the risk of diverting children from interactions that engage all of their senses and involve facial expressions, postures, and the importance of emotional resonance with a human interlocutor.
In other words, the fight against the dangers of screens for very young children lies less in the screen itself than in the tendency of some parents to offload their parenting tasks onto digital tools, and to show educational negligence without sometimes even realising it. We have always insisted on the importance of alternation, of accompaniment and of learning self-regulation. And also on the fact that all this is internalised by the child all the better when it is a practice the parents have adopted in their own lives and make visible to their child every day. In other words, for us there is never “a child and a technological tool”, but always “a child, a tool, and a family environment.”
A child only understands a device according to how those around them use it. This is what we commonly see today with smartphones. A child’s interest in these objects is directly linked to the importance they see their parents give them. It will probably be the same with voice assistants. Everything we have written for nearly 15 years about the importance of regulating the use of screens will therefore apply in the same way to voice assistants. In the end, everything will depend on the parents’ attitude towards their assistant. If you use it reasonably in front of your child, they will do the same. Is it dangerous for them? Yes, in a family where the smart speaker is on non-stop. So you need to know how to switch it off. For young children, you will need to plan for accompanied use, in short periods, exactly as for screens today. All the more so as these machines will encourage neither the child’s creativity, nor their socialisation, nor their facial and gestural interactions. These speakers will therefore present the same dangers as screens do today. Or rather, they will present one more.
For these machines will constantly capture their users’ personal data, not only from what they do with them – like screens – but from what they say all the time while forgetting that the machines are there. It would therefore be wise not to let children use them until they can be aware of this capture, at around 5 to 6 years old. Otherwise, it is the parents’ lives that will find their way, unbeknown to them, into the databases of Google, Amazon and the other GAFA. Will these voice assistants turn children into informants on their parents’ lives, without either side knowing?
Serge Tisseron is a psychiatrist, a doctor of psychology qualified to supervise research, a member of the Académie des technologies and an associate researcher at Université Paris VII Denis Diderot (CRPMS).
