Dr. Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Professor of Psychology at Temple University, has spent decades showing that language grows out of back-and-forth exchanges with live partners, and that most so-called educational apps fail the basic tests of how children actually learn.
Kathy Hirsh-Pasek is Professor of Psychology at Temple University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, one of the world's best-known policy research organisations. Her academic home is the study of how children acquire language, and her broader project, built up over decades of research, is what she and her colleagues call playful learning: the idea that play is not a break from learning but one of its most powerful engines.
She is worth listening to for a simple reason. The debate about children and screens is full of strong opinions and thin evidence. Hirsh-Pasek brings the opposite: a long, careful research record on the single question that matters most in the early years, which is how children learn to understand and use words. Language is the foundation on which reading, schooling and friendship are all built, so whoever understands how language grows understands a great deal about early childhood itself.
The core finding from her research is easy to state and hard to overstate: conversational turns, not passive exposure, drive language development. A conversational turn is the small loop a parent and child complete dozens of times a day without noticing. The child points, babbles or asks; the adult responds to what the child meant; the child responds back. That loop, repeated thousands of times across a childhood, is where vocabulary, grammar and meaning are built. Words that merely wash over a child, from a television in the corner or a tablet narrating a story to no one in particular, do far less work. The child is hearing language, but not using it, and language is learned by use.
This is why Hirsh-Pasek's work keeps returning to live partners. A screen can show a child the word; only a person can respond to the child's version of it, stretch it, correct it gently and hand it back. Her research on playful learning shows that children learn best when an adult follows the child's lead within an activity that has some gentle structure: a game, a story, a shared toy. Researchers call this guided play, and it consistently outperforms both free-for-all and formal drilling, because it keeps the child active and engaged while keeping the learning on track.
From this foundation she has drawn a conclusion that should reshape how parents read app-store marketing. Most apps labelled educational, she argues, fail the basic criteria of how children actually learn. Real learning happens when a child is active rather than passively receiving, engaged rather than distracted, when the material is meaningful, connected to the child's own life, and when the experience is socially interactive, involving another person. Hold the average toddler app up against those four criteria, active, engaged, meaningful, socially interactive, and it falls at almost every fence. The child taps where prompted, is interrupted by rewards and animations, learns content with no anchor in their day, and does it all alone. Her work at the Brookings Institution has carried this argument from the laboratory into public policy.
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Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Brookings Institution profile and publications · Read the original
The practical translation is unusually clear, and unusually kind to parents. You do not need flashcards, a curriculum or a single app. The thing your child's language needs most is something you already do: talking with them, about the things they are looking at, in ordinary moments. The research points to the quality of the loop, not the quantity of words fired at the child. Six genuine exchanges about a wooden cow, what it says, where it sleeps, why it has fallen over, are worth more than an hour of narration from a screen the child is not part of.
It also gives parents a fair test for any product that calls itself educational. Ask four questions. Is my child doing something, or watching something? Are they absorbed in the task itself, or in the rewards around it? Does this connect to anything in their actual life? And is anyone else involved? An app can occasionally pass one or two of these tests. A cardboard box and an older sibling pass all four without trying.
One honest caveat. Research in this field describes patterns across many children, not a verdict on any single afternoon in your house. A video call with a grandparent is screen time that is genuinely interactive. A quiet episode while a parent makes dinner has not damaged anyone. The point is not that screens are poison; it is that they are a poor substitute for the one ingredient that does the heavy lifting, which is conversation with someone who loves you.
Picture the scene Hirsh-Pasek's research keeps pointing towards. A parent and a three-year-old are on the floor with a basket of wooden farm animals between them. The child picks up the sheep and holds it out. "Sheep," says the parent, "where is she going?" The child marches it across the rug. "To bed!" "Is she tired? It is very late for a sheep." The child laughs and fetches a block for a pillow. That exchange took fifteen seconds and contained four conversational turns. No app on earth produced it. A shared object did.
This is the quiet genius of a physical toy: it is not the teacher, it is the table around which the teaching happens. The toy holds the child's attention in the middle of the floor, where the adult can join in, instead of inside a screen, where no one can. The weight of a beech block in a toddler's fist, the click as a domino is laid against its neighbour, the wobble of a tower that is one storey too brave: each of these is a small event that demands comment, and comment is exactly what language learning is made of. Toys that count, sort, stack and match, the kind found among traditional educational toys →, give the adult and child something concrete to talk about, which is the whole game.
Jaques London has been making toys that work this way since 1795, longer than any other games company in the world, and the principle has not changed in that time: the firm that invented croquet in 1851 and created the Staunton chess set in 1849 built objects for people to play with together. A simple set of wooden toys → is silent until a child and an adult give it a voice, and that, on Hirsh-Pasek's evidence, is precisely the point. The toy does ten per cent of the work. The conversation does the rest.
Hirsh-Pasek's profile and publications at the Brookings Institution are the best starting point for her writing on playful learning and what makes media genuinely educational. On this site, why real play beats screens sets out the wider case, our guide to open-ended toys explains which toys generate the most talk, and reducing screen time for toddlers turns the principle into a practical week-by-week plan.
The evidence says very little, and far less than conversation. Hirsh-Pasek's research shows language grows through back-and-forth exchanges with a live partner, and most apps offer a child no partner at all. An app can occupy a toddler; it cannot converse with one. If an app is used, it works best with an adult alongside, talking about what is on the screen.
A conversational turn is one complete loop: the child communicates, by word, babble or gesture, and you respond to what they meant, and they respond back. There is no magic daily number to hit. The research direction is simply more loops, woven into ordinary life: nappy changes, walks, bath time, and especially shared play, which is the richest source of turns there is.
It matters more than it looks. Passive exposure does little for language on its own, and a television running in the background tends to reduce the thing that does work: it interrupts children's play and quietly cuts the number of exchanges between parent and child. Turning it off when no one is actively watching is one of the easiest wins in this whole field.
Guided play sits between free play and instruction: the child leads, the adult follows with questions, comments and gentle nudges that keep the learning alive. In practice it means sitting down with whatever your child is playing with, narrating, wondering aloud and asking real questions, "which one is heaviest?", rather than quizzing. The child should feel played with, not taught.
Britain's oldest toy maker. Every toy open-ended, wooden, and built for exactly the kind of play the research recommends.