An absolute must-read for parents of young kids.

I put off reading this for months because I figured it would just add to my already out of control mom guilt. When my now almost two year old was born, I was very, very, very serious about no screen time. It was way at the top of my parenting priorities list. Then it turned out that my kid was what’s called high needs and would struggle with a lot of sensory issues and a tendency to get more overwhelmed than most toddlers as the day goes on and the stimulation piles up. In more ways than I can detail, she’s different than other kids, and much, much more intense, energetic, tantrum-prone, clingy, etc. My need for a toolbox of coping strategies exploded. Screen time got added to it, but I felt cripplingly guilty every single time. I guess I checked this book out because I hate myself? Because I assumed it would just confirm all the ways I was destroying her life.

Now that I’ve read it, I desperately, desperately want to convince Lisa Guernsey to write more books just like it. It’s thoroughly research-oriented and academic, but very approachable and balanced. What Guernsey did was basically sift through decades of research to answer the questions most parents have about screen time and presented them in an extremely unbiased way. If she has a pro- or anti-screen time agenda, I can’t find it. Some aspects of it are a lot less damaging than I thought. A couple are a lot more damaging than I thought. I feel much more able to make informed choices in my use of screens as a parent than I did before. I need this book on nutrition and discipline. OITNB fans, remember everyone following Suzanne around begging for her to write more about Rodcocker? That’s me with Lisa Guernsey.

It’s packed with details and studies, and I really want to summarize it thoroughly, but I also don’t want to discourage anyone from reading it who might be interested (and if you have kids 0-5 and are anything other than 100% confident in your screen usage, I cannot recommend it highly enough), so I’ll limit it to my biggest take-aways. Shows with a pause for kids to answer are the best, developmentally. They get the most from those. Blue’s Clues, Dora, newer Sesame Street. TV on in the background is amazingly terrible, which I didn’t know. I wasn’t too bad about that before but I’ve been much more cognizant of it since reading this. Concerns about television causing ADHD are largely overblown. Violent imagery is actually a really huge concern, and the bar for what’s considered violent is probably much, much lower than most people think. The AAP recommendation for a two hour cut-off is not super important, the important thing is that TV isn’t cutting into time that the child would otherwise be interacting with parents, engaging in imaginary play, etc. – but it doesn’t cut into that nearly as much as people usually think. It’s pretty useless for teaching kids to speak but surprisingly useful for lessons in things like persevering through hard tasks, sharing, etc. Interactive media like Leapfrog stuff is very often garbage because it’s not open-ended at all and doesn’t allow kids to use software in a way that the program doesn’t anticipate. Something like MS Paint is better because it allows for creativity. Concerns about TV leading to childhood obesity are legit but not at all for the reason most people expect: it’s not about the time spent stationary, but about advertising skewing their perceptions about healthy eating that’s a much bigger concern.

So if I’ve somehow failed to make it clear, parents with kids under 5, read it.