Should tots watch TV?

Most kids under 2 are parked in front of the electronic babysitter every day. Author Lisa Guernsey explains how the tube impacts the smallest couch potatoes.

By Katharine Mieszkowski

Read more: Video Games, Children, TV, Katharine Mieszkowski, Life

Sept. 14, 2007 | Journalist Lisa Guernsey's first child was just 5 weeks old and colicky when a sympathetic friend introduced the harried new mom to "baby crack," better known as Baby Mozart. The baby-crack-pusher promised that this video for infants and toddlers could buy Guernsey and her daughter some temporary relief. So, Guernsey popped that sucker in the VCR, and along with her 5-week-old, went down the rabbit hole into the strange, fun-house world of children's media, where you're never too young to be plugged in.

As a reporter for the New York Times, Guernsey had covered personal technology, digital media and electronic toys. For her new book, "Into the Minds of Babes: How Screen Time Affects Children From Birth to Age Five," she scrutinized the most recent research on kids' videos, TV, interactive games and Web sites to try to suss out what infants and toddlers actually comprehend when they look at the screen, and how it impacts them, for good or ill. The book draws on interviews with child psychologists and parents, as well as her own experiences raising two daughters, now ages 3 and 5.

Guernsey comes off as neither an opponent of kids under 5 watching videos -- her own did, and still do -- nor as an apologist for the much-hyped educational claims of many baby videos and interactive games. Notably, she finds as much for parents to be concerned about in background television (when a TV is just left turned on for hours on end even if no one is watching it) as anything that's explicitly made for young kids.

Salon reached Guernsey by phone at her home office in Alexandria, Va., where she argued that letting your child watch the tube won't warp her developing brain, yet it's unlikely to give her a leg up on language development either.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children under age 2 watch no TV and spend no time in front of the computer. Yet, 60 percent of parents allow their kids under 2 to watch some TV or video every day. What do you make of this discrepancy?

I found that it's pretty unrealistic for most families to keep TV away from their youngest kids, even in well-meaning ways. Many households use the television for information and entertainment, and to find out what the weather is going to be like.

Is there any evidence that young kids today actually spend more time in front of the TV screen than kids the same age did 30 years ago?

I really tried to figure that out. I kept thinking: "Is it just that we have nostalgia for some bygone day when children were forever playing with pots and pans on the floor? Or, are we forgetting that even in the '60s and '70s, there was television on when toddlers were around?"

I never came up with a satisfactory answer. But what I did find is that even some studies looking at time spent in front of the TV back in the '90s showed more television use among young kids, before the days of Baby Einstein, than today.

Do you see videos for very young children as a convenience for the parents rather than as a benefit for the child?

Parents, myself included, have used video to take a breath, to make a bunch of phone calls that they need to make, to unload the dishwasher. I think that video, certainly with these younger ages, is being used as a way to buy some time.

There was a recent study from the University of Washington, which found that Baby Einstein may actually hinder children's language development, leading bloggers to cackle "Baby Einstein makes baby stupid!" Did you find any evidence that Baby Einstein is beneficial in anyway?

I did not. What I did find is that videos like Baby Einstein that may purport to stimulate cognitive development or language learning may not be designed using the principles that developmental psychologists know apply to these very young children.

An example is the way that children learn language. The more a caregiver points to and labels what they're talking about -- "Here's an apple. Do you want an apple for your lunch? It's a red apple" -- and the more the child is able to see that apple at the exact same time those words are being said, the more children will learn. They'll get the word "apple." They'll start to understand the color red. But a lot of these videos are not designed with those principles in mind.

You debunk a lot of the popular beliefs about the bad things TV does to kids, for instance, the idea that when kids watch TV they turn into zoned-out "zombies," or catch attention deficit hyperactivity disorder [ADHD]. What's the evidence that's not true?

Those were two things that I worried about a lot as a mom. There are no studies that show television causing attention problems. All we have is a link, an association. The more that I talked to experts on ADHD, I found a lot of reason to think that children who have attention problems are either more attracted to television, or their parents use the television more in their households.

Because the parents need a break from the ADHD kids?

It may be hard to focus those kids' attention on a book, it's hard to get them to stay in one place in the room. Perhaps the parents of children like that are finding: "OK, at least I can get 30 minutes or an hour of peace if we turn on the TV."

The other piece is the fact that ADHD has a genetic component. Many researchers see that people with ADHD use the television more, they have it on in their houses more often. So, you have the ADHD parent, who then has the TV on more often in their house, and they're caring for a young child. But to say that looking at a screen for 30 minutes a day is going to cause attention problems, there's just no evidence of that at all.

What about the zombie theory?

The zombie effect is the idea that children mentally clock out when they're watching TV, that they're intellectually vacant.

In fact, what I found is more and more research that shows how mentally engaged children are, particularly after age 2 and a half to 3. They're really trying to figure out what they're seeing on the screen. There are studies done on "Sesame Street" that showed that children could clearly detect a difference at very young ages between a scrambled version of "Sesame Street" and the real one. The fact that they can make that distinction is proof that when they're watching, they're engaged.

Next page: The hidden dangers of background TV