Toddlers and TV

I’m going a little off-topic this week, but I wanted to let you know about a really interesting book I just read. As a parenting writer, I interview several authors each month who have written books on everything from toilet training to maternity fashion to donor insemination; some are insightful, some make me wonder how a publisher was conned into writing a check for such a heaping pile of crap. But this month the galley of a book called Into the Minds of Babes: How Screen Time Affects Children from Birth to Age Five arrived in my mailbox. It was written by Lisa Guernsey, an education reporter for the New York Times. Guernsey has two daughters roughly the same age as Bellamy and Molly, and has gone through the same soul-searching about TV that I have. The American Academy of Pediatrics tells us we shouldn’t let kids under two watch any TV at all, but then you have the Little Einstein folks telling us that repeated viewings of frog puppets dancing to Mozart will turn our babies into creative geniuses. Guernsey, like me, was skeptical about both claims, and set out to investigate the truth about what TV does—positive and negative—to kids. She did a kick-ass job combing through every bit of research that has been done on kids and TV, and found that a lot of the hysterical claims about TV turning kids into mindless zombies or causing ADHD do not stand up to scrutiny. She also visited research centers and interviewed early childhood experts across the country and found that kids under five do not learn in the same way that producers of those educational videos claim they do. The bottom line is that TV itself is neither harmful nor helpful to children. It’s all about context and content.

I remember when Bellamy was around two, a highly neurotic mom I knew was complaining to me that she could never get a five-minute break from her kid to unload the dishwasher or flip through a magazine. “Why don’t you let her play a computer game or watch a video for a half hour?” I said. She looked at me as if I had suggested she sprinkle some crack on her daughter’s Cheerios. But as Guernsey concluded, putting your child in front of an age-appropriate TV show for a half hour is not going to hurt them in any way, and if it gives the mom a few minutes to chill and revive, then it is actually a good thing for everyone. So check out the book. It’s a fun read, and you’ll never look at Blue’s Clues the same way again.