Early parenting choices are never clear-cut, and deciding whether or not to allow your infant to watch television or DVDs ranks as one of the more perplexing.
Thanks to marketing claims for TV shows and DVDs created for babies, many parents believe that watching educational programming will stimulate infants’ brains and actually promote learning. It’s a seductive line of reasoning — certainly, exposing a baby to brain-engaging DVDs will put him on an early path to becoming, well, a Baby Einstein, right? Maybe not. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no television time for toddlers younger than 2, in large part because no studies have yet established that TV exposure improves babies’ learning. Now a new study published in the current issue of Pediatrics confirms that position. (See the 100 best TV shows of all time.)
Marie Evans Schmidt, a research associate in the Center on Media and Child Health at Children’s Hospital in Boston, studied more than 800 youngsters from birth to three years, recording the time they spent watching television or DVDs, as reported by their mothers, as well as their performance on language and motor skill tests. On average, the babies spent 1.2 hours a day watching TV during their first two years of life, slightly less than the average viewing time reported in previous studies.
In her initial analysis, Schmidt found that babies who spent more time in front of the TV performed worse on language and motor skill tests at age 3 than those who watched less. But once Schmidt and her team controlled for other factors — namely the mother’s educational status and household income — the relationship between TV viewing and cognitive development disappeared. That means that TV viewing in and of itself did not appear to influence babies’ brain development; rather it was a parent’s education and finances that mattered more. “Initially it looked like TV viewing was associated with cognitive development,” says Schmidt, “but in fact TV viewing is an outgrowth of other characteristics of the home environment that lead to lower test scores.” (Read “Are We Failing Our Geniuses?”)
