Their tiny fingers pound away on huge keyboards. They click-click-click on mice larger than their hands. They sit in oversize chairs with their feet dangling. They slump and lean and slouch.
With all that, is there a danger that kids may develop the sort of wrist and neck problems that plague adult computer users?
The short answer is no one really knows.
Very few formal studies of kids and ergonomics exist, and the best that experts can advise is to play it safe and try to keep home computer setups as adjustable as possible.
“It’s more important, if anything, to teach children how to sit at computers,” said Alan Hedge, a professor of human ergonomics at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. “Children may learn bad postural habits that they may never break.”
Hedge and a few colleagues in the school’s Department of Design and Environmental Analysis began studying children’s posture and computer setups a few years ago.
“At that time, people were beginning to make noises about how the school of the future would have a computer on every desk, and there were all these initiatives about hardware acquisition, but no one was giving any thought to the physical environment,” Hedge said.
In schools, computers tend to be plunked down on existing tabletops. At home, a computer desk and chair are likely to be sized for the adults of the house. Neither setup promotes good computer posture.
He and several colleagues studied grade schoolers in urban, suburban and rural schools in eastern Michigan.
“They were working in postures that, if we saw them in adults, we’d associate them with repetitive stress injuries,” Hedge said. “It makes it clear that the furniture that children were working with was quite inadequate for computer use.”
In a second study in Ithaca, they provided 6th graders with adjustable keyboard trays that tilted backward. Without receiving any instructions, the kids naturally fell into better posture, Hedge said.
The main problem with the tilted trays was that the kids, who weren’t touch typists, couldn’t see the keys as well, he said.
Dr. Maureen Finnegan, an associate professor of orthopedics at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, said the main concern is to make sure the screen height can be adjusted to put it at eye level so kids don’t have to crane their necks up or down.
Marvin Dainoff, director of the Center for Ergonomic Research at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, is concerned about mouse use because so many children’s programs are heavy on point-and-click graphics. Using a mouse can aggravate wrist troubles. “All I can do is sort of shrug,” Dainoff said. “The studies are done on adult hands.”
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Even a manufacturer of children’s computer furniture said the issue is fuzzy.
“We don’t claim to have a lot of research about what is the cutting edge for children,” said Riaz Jurney, president of Skools Inc.