Parents are often shocked when I tell them that pediatricians
think it’s a bad idea for children to watch TV before age 2.
Surveys tell us about 40% of infants are watching some sort of
video by age 5 months, and by age 2 the number rises to 90%.
Early brain development To answer these questions we have to
return briefly to the child’s developing brain. Kids’ brains
grow profoundly during the first 3 years of life, with the brain
tripling in mass in just the first 12 months. The stimuli
children experience during this period profoundly influence
brain development. Images on screens behave in ways that differ
dramatically from those in the real world. Because we’re all
steeped in the visual language of screens, it’s easy to forget
those differences until we think about them. Imagine a ball in
real life and a ball on TV. Infants are developing 3-dimensional
vision. The world of the screen exists in 2 dimensions, so the
ball is just a flat, shaded circle. If you roll a ball across
the floor it proceeds in a sing