Rethinking T.V. Time For Toddlers

Elizabeth Drier does everything she can to stimulate her son Clayton's mind -through playtime and television time:

"As far as developmental videos, I really thought they made a huge difference for him, in identifying shapes and colors and rhythm and music and all that," Drier says.

Turns out, tuning in to T.V. and educational videos may not be doing what many parents of babies and toddlers think, reports CBS News correspondent Sandra Hughes.

A new study from Children's Hospital of Boston, published in the journal "Pediatrics," found T.V. viewing "does not seem to be associated with (the development of) language or visual motor skills...."

"Television had no independent effect on their brain development," says the hospital's Dr. Michael Rich. "So it did not help them, but it also did not seem to hurt them, either."

For more than a decade, pediatricians warned parents that children under the age of 2 shouldn't watch any T.V. - but still they do.

National findings show that 68 percent of children under 2 watch T.V. every day. A quarter of them even have televisions in their bedrooms.

The babies in the new study watched, on average, an hour a day at 6 months old, and up to an hour-and-a-half by 2 years old.

While the new study says there's nothing good or bad about that for brain development - the authors say parents shouldn't just turn the remote control over to their toddlers.

"Kids who watch a lot of T.V. early tend to be more overweight, they tend to have more attention problems and more sleep disruptions," Dr. Rich says.

But with all the money spent marketing educational videos and children's television - and the convenience of having an electronic babysitter -- pediatrians may have a hard time convincing parents to pull the plug.
By Sandra Hughes