The magical powers of this handheld gizmo have given parents all sorts of unprecedented freedoms.  Moms and dads now can carry on a conversation during dinner at the local diner, shop for new window treatments in peace, upload summer vacation photos uninterrupted, and do the dishes without having to wait until after bedtime.  It is a parenting tactic as old as the television set, only better because it is mobile.

The problem is, handing over your iPhone to an infant often means it comes back bruised from its encounters with sticky fingers, teething mouths, sippy cups, and hands that like to let things fall from high places.  This month, Fisher-Price put on the market a new product designed to protect our iPhones from such mishaps.  The Laugh & Learn Apptivity Case.  It is a durable rubber sleeve that envelopes the iPhone and comes with easy-to-grip handles, side rattles, and a mirror on the back.  We parents now have zero reasons not to give up our iPhones to our two-year-olds.

Remember when we were kids?  The only phones we had to play with were hard plastic receivers that sat on a cradle and did absolutely nothing.  They weren't "educational" and "interactive" like today's smartphones.  I am sure that our mothers felt a tinge of guilt whenever they plopped us in our playpens with our do-nothing telephones so that they could catch up on the neighborhood gossip with Marge.  But we parents can feel good about handing over these uber sophisticated, high technology learning machines while we wait in line at Starbucks.    

But is the iPhone, with all its pokeable storybooks and talking flashcards, really more educational and interactive than the educational toys we grew up with.  We had blocks and balls.  And crayons and clay.  The simpleness of these toys makes them seem neurologically inferior to today's flashy smartphones.  Surely an app that names and spells animated farm animals that moo and baa promotes vocabulary growth much more effectively than a pile of plastic cows and sheep. 

At least that what you'd think unless you've read the latest science in the developmental journals.  Not a single study shows that any of today's electronic gadgets give children an intellectual edge over their playmates who stick to teddy bears, board books, blocks, and empty cardboard boxes.  Nor will there likely ever be. 

"Wha?" you're thinking?  "How can a red rubber ball be better for my toddler's brain than a multimedia app that lets her fly a helicopter through obstacles in the house, breed frogs for specific genetic traits, and play eye-spy with exotic fish in a saltwater aquarium? It's because digital gizmos, despite their marketing, really are not interactive at all.  Pushing a button, swiping a finger, and tapping a screen are not real interactions.  Real interactions don't happen on a liquid crystal display.  Rather they happen only with real objects and real people in the real world.  

But what about "educational" apps that are "designed to boost brain growth?"  Can't they turn your toddler into a genius while you fold the laundry?  Not even close.  There is no scientific evidence that any "educational" app, learning system, computer program, or set of DVDs can increase infant intellect.  They can't because they can't be programmed to interact in the nuanced, finely tuned way that moms, dads, and other caretakers do.  So the real problem with handing over your iPhone means that your child is spending less and less time interacting with real people to develop the cognitive, social, and emotional skills they'll need to succeed in life.   

Take the case of language learning apps.  These products are marketed as educational programs that boost language acquisition.  The thing is, they really don't.  If anything, they slow it down.  Dozens of studies have demonstrated that time spent using these programs can hinder rather than help language development.  Why?  It's because children's brains have been designed during the course of human evolution to learn language though social interaction, not from talking screens.  Children need to hear fleshy people engaged in meaty conversations to learn language. 

Even splashy multimedia programs built to interact with its users cannot mirror the finely tuned way real human beings interact with one another.  They don't pause long enough or they pause too long before giving a response or asking a new question.  Nor do they adapt when children try to drive the conversation.  No matter how hard little Joey tries to get his Learn To Talk app to talk about the butterfly he sees in the backyard, it is going to persist with its conversation about the three minus two cupcakes it is in the middle of.  Real people, however, can steer the conversation in whatever direction children want to go.  They can work to keep the youngest of conversational partners, those who don't even talk yet, to hang in there, take their turn, and ask for snack of goldfish crackers.  

"Wait a minute," you say.  "The Lapiluv solves the fleshy people interaction problem."  How so?  The Lapiluv is a "wearable play system," or apron, that has a series of pockets to secure iPods, iPhones, and iPads to mom, and hooks for attaching more traditional, nondigital toys.  For seventy bucks a pop, infants can get their social interaction with mom while simultaneously patting a virtual bunny, all without having to worry about a falling smartphone.  What could be better? 

The answer?  No apron.  Mounds of scientific evidence demonstrate that sharing technology still doesn't cut the cake.  Consider, for instance, as study by University of Virginia developmental psychologist Judy DeLoache and her colleagues.  DeLoache found that babies who watched a well-known series of language learning DVDs regularly for one month evidenced no greater understanding of words from the program than babies who never saw it at all.  The result was the same when even when mothers watched the DVDs with their babies and were asked to interact naturally.  This is an extraordinary finding.  Technology plus social interaction didn't work.  And even more extraordinary is a further finding that the only infants who showed any word learning were those in a no-DVD condition whose mothers tried to teach them the very same words during everyday activities, without ever showing the program to their children.  Social interaction only wins. 

So before you hand over your Apptivity Cased iPhone to your infant or tie on a "wearable play system," it is important to ask yourself what you expect to get out of it.  If you expect an uninterrupted shower, than a bit of Angry Birds is fine.  But if you expect it to teach your infant something about the real world, you should rethink.  Don't rely on a machine to do your job.