How Much Television Should an Infant Watch?

Parents can strengthen their families, communities, and nations by limiting the amount of time that infants and toddlers spend watching screens. For my last assignment for the spring semester, I studied the effect of screen time on the minds of children aged birth to three years old.

Some of the material that I studied was a video presentation by Dimitri Christakis (2011) – a pediatrician, researcher, and parent. He discussed how the brain of a newborn is about one-third of the size (333 grams) of the brain of a two-year-old child (999 grams). This means that the brain grows quicker in the first two years than at any other time during a person’s lifetime. The brain continues to grow until approximately 20 years of age before it starts to shrink. 

Christakis (2011) said that we are born with all the brain cells or neurons that we will have during our lifetime. Since the number of brain cells or neurons does not increase, how does it grow? Christakis (2011) explained that the brain grows from the connections or synapses between the brain cells. A newborn child has about 2,500 synapses, while a three-year-old child has about 15,000.

One of the areas where growth takes place is in language. Christakis (2011) taught that any child born anywhere in the world has the ability to speak fluently any language in the world. However, they will actually speak only the language or languages to which they are exposed. If a child is exposed to English, he will speak English. If a child is exposed to Japanese, she will speak Japanese. If a child is exposed to one language, she will speak one language. If a child is exposed to more than one language, he will speak more than one language as a native speaker. If a person learns a language later than puberty, they can learn to speak it and understand it, but they will not sound like a native speaker.

The first three years of a child’s life are critical for cognitive development, so we should be careful about what we feed into his or her brains. Studies over several decades, such as those involving children in orphanages in Romania, showed that too little stimulation in the early years is bad for brain development. According to Christakis (2011) some types of media can over-stimulate (over-stimulation hypothesis) the brains of infants and toddlers and lead to the child having attention problems later. Any television show or DVD that goes faster than Mr. Rogers could be considered to be fast paced, which over-stimulates.

Christakis (2011) said that children under the age of 18 months should not be exposed to any screen media other than video-chatting. When infants are exposed to rapid image changes contained in most television shows and videos, their brains are preconditioned to expect elevated levels of stimulation, leading to attention problems in real life. Christakis (2011) explained that a child’s chances of developing attention problems are increased 10 percent for every hour per week of television watched before the age of three years. Example: A child watches two hours of television per week, their chances of having attention problem increase 20 percent.

The good news is that the chances of a child having attention problems later in life can be decreased 30 percent per hour per week by reading to the child, taking the child to a museum, singing/dancing with the child (Christakis, 2011). Only one type of media is approved by Christakis (2011) for infants. Interactive media can be used with fifteen-month-old infants and older IF the parent interacts with them (Christakis, 2011).

Attention problems in children can be avoided by keeping infants away from screens other than Facetime-type of media where they are interacting with actual people. By being careful about the media that their infants consume, parents can strengthen their families, communities, and nations.