May 2006
Your Parenting Coach: How Young Is Too Young to Start Watching TV and DVDs?
My husband and I are thinking about getting the new Sesame Street DVDs for our daughter who turns 10 months in June. We’ve been reading that the American Academy of Pediatrics doesn’t recommend them. Yet, some other experts say they are OK in moderation. Can you shed some light on this issue for us?
--Katie/Seattle
In 1999, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) released its recommendations regarding TV and media and strongly “discouraged television viewing for children younger than 2 years of age.” Two decades of neuroscience research gave the Academy plenty of compelling information about what young brains need most to develop optimally. TV, videos and DVDs are great educational tools. But they are not the best tools for infants and toddlers.
Let’s consider why that is so.
1. In order to develop the capacity for healthy emotional bonds, babies and young children need to look at and relate to their parents and caring people as much as possible.
Little ones want and need to interact with the loving people around them – flesh and blood people, not characters on 2-D screens. In fact, healthy emotional bonding is the primary developmental task at this age. Young brains are wired to pick up subtle clues from parent-child interactions that will affect them either positively or negatively in their future ability to become emotionally healthy and autonomous individuals.
In their wonderful book, A General Theory of Love (Thomas Lewis, M.D., Fari Amini, M.D., Richard Lannon, M.D., Vintage Books, 2001), the authors, who are all medical doctors, point out, “…when we engage in relatedness, (we) fall under the gravitational influence of another’s emotional world, at the same time that we are bending his emotional world with ours.” In other words, relating between humans is a highly reciprocal act with each person adjusting to and learning from the other.
This type of adjustment and learning does not take place with characters on a screen. The baby responds to what’s on TV, but she relates to live human beings. This is a critical distinction. For youngsters, experiencing human relatedness actually grows important areas of their brains.
2. Even if children interact with the DVD with their parents, it distracts them from experiencing the full advantages of loving human relatedness.
Young brains are vulnerable to bright colors, loud sounds and quick cuts. Since their brains are not well organized yet, salient 2-D visual images can distract youngsters from fully participating in the parent-child interaction. When parents introduce the screen machine in their interactions with their babies and toddlers, they are letting the screen images lead the parent-child interaction. By contrast, when we sing, clap and play with our youngsters without the screen interference, we lead. Our child knows this and attends to us very carefully.
3. There is a growing body of research that demonstrates serious negative outcomes of early exposure to TV and video.
Frederick J. Zimmerman, Ph.D., and Dimitri A. Christakis, M.D., M.P.H., of the University of Washington recently assessed data on 1,797 children (“Television Viewing and Cognitive Outcomes: A Longitudinal Analysis of National Data,” Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, July 2005). Scores in mathematics, reading recognition and reading comprehension were compared with the level of television watching before age 3 and from ages 3 to 5. Their analysis showed that the more television children watched before age 3, the lower their scores on the academic tests.
In another important study of 2,500 children, Christakis and Zimmerman found early television exposure was linked to attentional difficulties at age 7 (“Does Children’s Watching of Television Cause Attention Problems?” Pediatrics, November 2004). The authors also found irregular sleep schedules among children under age 3 who watched television (“The Association Between Television Viewing and Irregular Sleep Schedules in Children Less Than 3 Years of Age,” Pediatrics, October 2005).
Before you and your husband decide to use TV and DVDs with your baby, I recommend you consider this research and read and discuss A General Theory of Love. Then listen to what your heart is telling you. Your daughter is blessed by the care you are giving this important decision.
Gloria DeGaetano is founder and CEO of the Bellevue-based Parent Coaching Institute, as well as a parent educator and author. She hosts Parent Appreciation Radio Saturdays at 11 a.m. on 1150 AM, KKNW-Seattle. You may send questions for this column to Gloria@thepci.com or to nweditor@seattleschild.com or nweditor@pugetsoundparent.com.
©Gloria DeGaetano, 2006
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