Swiping Before Speaking: The Digital Lifestyle Habits of Today's Parents Are Rubbing Off on Kids

Digital literacy is becoming natural to children before they can even speak, let alone read. Despite how you personally feel about kids' screen time and device usage, it seems it's the new norm that children are "swiping" before uttering their first word, taking after the digital lifestyle habits of their parents.

According to the results of a survey conducted by MiMedia — a personal cloud to store all of your media on all of your devices — nearly three out of five parents said their child was able to swipe on a touchscreen device before they learned their first word (that's 58 percent of participants!). These particular results of the survey — which explored digital media trends and the online habits of 1,000 American parents with children ranging in age from newborn to 3 years — are not even the most shocking.

Of all the findings, perhaps the most surprising is that almost half of the participants said their child aged 3 and under likes taking selfies — so not only are children swiping across touchscreens, they're holding the phone cameras in front of themselves and snapping photos all before being enrolled in preschool. And whether that selfie was taken by the baby or not, 57 percent of parents said they believed moms were sharing too many of those baby photos on Facebook and Instagram.

Although many of these findings are not surprising in the least — for example, 71 percent of participants believe moms take more photos of their kids than dads — the rest of the results tends to suggest that our digital habits are significantly rubbing off on our kids.

The least shocking — and most universally annoying — result of the survey, though? Three out of four parents admit to running out of storage on their phones due to taking too many videos and photos of their children.

Hey, we're guilty of that one, too — our kids are adorably photogenic.