If you ’re going to put your preschooler in front of a screen, choose a TV. Here’s why | Sophie Brickman

Screens aren ’t all the same. When it comes to cognition, there are big differences between an iPad and a televisionFor her first few years of life, my daughter Ella likely thought the television played a single piece of content: the 1993 version of George Balanchine ’s Nutcracker, starring as the title role one Macaulay Culkin, who spends the majority of the ballet running around stage and flourishing his arm as the corps of the New York City Ballet actually dances. My mother had mentioned the story to Ella one day and I ’d found this free version, by chance, on YouTube. It was charming, and on the scale of Really Bad Things You Can Expose Your Child To, seemed pretty anodyne. As a millennial parent, I was highly attuned to this scale, spending my days wading through a morass of screaming headlines arguing that ev en a few minutes of screen time might set my child down the asocial, Vitamin D-deprived path of playing Fortnite 22 hours a day and subsisting on Soylent.But as Ella got older, and started to suspect this magic screen might hold other treasures, I decided to get a handle on how to approach the television. What I learned helped me form a cornerstone of our household ’s tech philosophy for life with preschool children.Continue reading...
Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Science Children Family Children's health Children's TV Life and style Source Type: news