PARENTS should keep children under the age of 2 away from television screens because . That’s what the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) said in 1999. The academy has now renewed its opposition, claiming that the latest evidence shows toddler TV impairs language development and attention. The reality, however, is more complicated.
In one sense, TV indirectly impairs cognitive development if it takes up too much of a toddler’s day. A 2008 study found that children who began watching TV before their 1st birthday, and who then watched more than 2 hours every day, were six times as likely to have language deficits as their peers (Acta Paediatrica, ).
A by Commonsense Media, a non-profit organisation based in San Francisco, suggests that 47 per cent of US children under the age of 2 watch TV and DVDs, spending an average of nearly 2 hours in front of the box each day.
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Although such studies show that TV eats into the time that children might spend on more cognitively nourishing activities – face-to-face interactions with parents and siblings, for instance – they do not demonstrate that there is anything inherent in the medium of TV that is responsible for language problems.
In 2005, at the University of Iowa in Iowa City and her colleagues traced how the media diets of 51 infants and toddlers from 6 to 30 months of age influenced their language skills. Surprisingly, an educational classic – Sesame Street – did not improve the children’s vocabulary. Neither did Teletubbies or Barney & Friends.
Many news reports jumped on the evidence as a chance to slam Sesame Street for “negatively influencing” language development, but that missed a crucial point: Linebarger’s study found that most educational shows did, in fact, improve the children’s vocabulary skills (American Behavioral żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ, ).
“When they talk about that study of mine, they only cite the negative effects, but we found positive relationships too,” says Linebarger. The research suggested that watching narrative shows, like Clifford the Big Red Dog, or shows that break the fourth wall and talk directly to the viewer, such as Dora the Explorer, resulted in larger vocabularies and helped young children to be more expressive with language.
It is likely that, for all of the good intentions of its makers, a show like Sesame Street is simply not structured in a way that promotes language development in toddlers.
Overall, the evidence suggests that there is nothing about television per se that is damaging to the young, developing brain. Instead, it is how often kids watch TV and what kind of shows they watch that determines whether or not they benefit.
“We tend to think of television monolithically, but not all TV is bad,” admits of the University of Washington and Seattle Children’s Hospital, who is one of the authors of the AAP’s updated policy. “What matters is what is on.”
