For many parents, it’s not a matter of whether our kids’ screen time has increased in the past year, but by how much. It can be easy to feel guilty about the vast number of hours our children have spent with their faces buried in a screen, watching yet another Odd Squad marathon. But there is a simple way to make all that mindless TV-watching a bit more educational: Turn on the subtitles.
My husband and I have always liked having the captions on while we’re watching a TV show so we can keep the volume down without missing any dialogue. Because of that, the captions are almost always on when my son tunes in to a show, too. In the years before he could read—and even during the very early stages of reading—the captions were an annoying distraction from his TV-viewing experience. But around the time his reading skills really started taking off, I noticed he stopped complaining about the captions and stopped asking me to turn them off. He was both watching and reading, reinforcing what he was learning in school.
English actor and comedian Stephen Fry endorses this method, too:
Of course, if you’ve ever watched TV with the captions on, you know it’s not a perfect system. It can be annoying when the words appear before the characters have said them or if there’s a long delay between the words being spoken and then appearing on the screen. Plus, there was that one time my son was watching SpongeBob SquarePants, but the captions on the screen were for another show, and the words “I’m a wild card! I’m a wild card!” kept appearing over and over.
“I was like, ‘Okay, you’re a wild card, I get it,’” my son recalls. But overall, he says the captions helped him learn new words and reinforced how to spell harder words. (In particular, he went through a major Star Wars: The Clone Wars phase, in which he learned how to spell names like “Ahsoka.”)
G/O Media may get a commission
Beyond my own anecdotal experience—and Stephen Fry’s encouragement—there is also research that suggests reading subtitles can improve early childhood literacy. According to the “Turn on the Subtitles” campaign:
A key finding of eye-tracking research on subtitling, which studies the automatic reading behavior of children and adults, is that viewers who have some decoding ability—even partial letter-to-sound correspondence—just cannot ignore the subtitles and will exhibit automatic reading responses.
I’m not suggesting that TV captions are a substitute for reading actual books (definitely keep reading to your kids), but turning on the subtitles is an easy way to help kids increase word recognition.
This article was originally published in 2019. It was updated on March 1, 2021 to reflect current information and style.
