How young is too young to park a child in front of the TV set?
The American Academy of Pediatrics’ rule has been steadfast: No television under age 2.
Now the venerable educational organization that pioneered “Sesame Street” is overlooking that age limit with a new DVD series, “Sesame Beginnings,” which targets babies and toddlers from 6 months to 2 years.
The videos, scheduled to appear in stores April 4, feature baby versions of the most beloved characters from “Sesame Street” – Elmo, Big Bird, Cookie Monster and Prairie Dawn – dancing and singing with their Muppet parents and other relatives.
“This could be the beginning of some beautiful friendships!” baby Elmo’s dad says enthusiastically in one scene.
But the product’s launch has frayed some friendships and professional alliances among experts who monitor the impact of media on young minds.
“Essentially it is a betrayal of babies and families,” said Harvard Medical School psychologist Susan Linn, founder of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood.
“There is no evidence that media is beneficial for babies, and they are starting to find evidence that it may be harmful. Until we know for sure, we shouldn’t risk putting them in front of the television.”
Sesame Workshop, which for 37 years has pioneered children’s educational television, teamed up with Zero to Three, a respected nonprofit child-development and advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C., to produce the DVDs. It’s the first time the workshop has trained its marketing savvy on children under age 2 and their parents.
Executives at Sesame, as well as Zero to Three, consider the DVDs not only age-appropriate, but groundbreaking.
“We took a long time and did a lot of research and preparation. We wanted to make sure we did this right,” Rosemarie Truglio, vice president of education and research for Sesame Workshop, said Monday.
Zero to Three’s critics say the group has succumbed to an “if you can’t beat them, join them” philosophy.
“They apparently feel that parents are going to let their kids watch television, so we might as well get into the game, too,” said Harvard psychiatry professor Alvin F. Poussaint, a steering committee member for CCFC.
He calls Zero to Three “downright irresponsible. … That they should have an alliance with Sesame on this really damages their credibility.”
Babies and toddlers are a booming segment of the electronic media market. The Kaiser Family Foundation last December issued a report on “an explosion” in such products for the suckling-and-teething set – from computer programs such as “JumpStart Baby” to videos produced by a company known as Baby Einstein.
Sales of most of the products, the report said, were driven by unsupported claims that they were educational.
Kaiser reported that 68 percent of children under 2 view two hours of television daily and only 6 percent of parents know about the pediatrician group’s no-TV recommendation, which it adopted in 1999.
“Kids that age are only awake 12 hours a day, so we have a generation of children who are watching television 10 percent to 20 percent of their waking lives – and that’s a dramatic increase,” said pediatrician Dimitri Christakis, director of the Child Health Institute at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Christakis’ research has found that early exposure to television could prove detrimental to attention span and cognitive development.
Other research suggests that television viewing by babies could harm language development and sleep patterns. And there’s the “instead-of” caveat – babies and toddlers glued to the tube aren’t doing other healthy activities such as creative play and interacting with parents.
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