AmericanAcademyOfPediatrics
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Doctors relax rules on letting babies watch screens
Ever since 1999, many pediatricians have clung to one main recommendation about kids and gadgets: you shouldn't show screens to any child under 2 years old. However, they've just loosened that once-firm policy. The American Academy of Pediatrics has softened its guidelines to permit screens for the under-2 crowd in the right circumstances. If your little ones are 18 months or older, they can watch "high-quality programming" (think PBS and Sesame Workshop) so long as you're there to help your kids understand. Any younger than that and you should limit them to video chat, the AAP says.
Shocker! Kids spending too much time in front of TV screens, too little in loving parents' embrace
Not that anyone really needed to have this spelled out, but America's tots are apparently spending too much time in front of the telly tubes. The latest study, conducted by the Seattle Children's Research Institute and the University of Washington, finds that children under the age of five are spending 4.1 hours of each day watching movies or TV, doubling the recommended maximum of two hours a day. Whether you take the slightly arbitrary two-hour RDA to heart or not, it's undeniable that all of us -- not just the young 'uns -- are spending increasingly larger chunks of our time looking at the world through a screen and not through our own retinas. And, if you want an extra topping of alarmist extrapolation, these figures come from a research sample concluded in 2006, today's better-equipped toddlers are very likely to outdo those numbers when mobile devices and the like are factored in. Imagine how bad this would all be if the US didn't have so much quality programming to entertain and educate them with.
