Ming @ Agents of SpeechSpeech Therapist at Agents of Speech

Reason Why Children Won’t Look At You But Will Look Intensely at their iPad?

Name: Reason Why Children Won’t Look At You But Will Look Intensely at their iPad?
Uploaded: 2024-02-28T13:00:26+00:00
Duration: 53 s
Channel: Ming @ Agents of Speech
Description: A short video by Ming (Agents of Speech) explaining why some children avoid eye contact with caregivers but focus intensely on iPads. Ming argues that…

28 Feb 2024 · 1 min

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A short video by Ming (Agents of Speech) explaining why some children avoid eye contact with caregivers but focus intensely on iPads. Ming argues that eye contact is driven by perceived information value: children who are delayed or who lack expressive language may not seek social information from caregivers, so they won’t look; however, intense iPad gaze reflects interest in clearly salient stimuli, and the core issue can be differentiating what is socially important rather than a lack of joint attention.

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The reason for eye contact is that there's something. There's some information from me that the person wants from me, okay? And a lot of times that means speaking, right? If a child is delayed, they don't know how to say something. They're looking for cues, right? If your child doesn't even want to talk to you or even want to create like a certain speech sound or use language, why would they look? And this is only for eye contact. What about eye gaze or joint attention, looking at the things together? So let me ask you this. Does your child look intensely when you turn on the iPad? Yes. So it's not that they don't have joint attention. It's just that they don't know whether this thing is important or not. Right? To them. And if they don't understand whether something is important or not, then it's not the problem with the joint attention, right? It's the problem that they cannot differentiate what is socially important or not.