Video: Should Your Kids Watch TV?

Should young children be exposed to television screens? It’s a question many parents find difficult to answer — in part because of the amount of folk-wisdom out there (‘TV turns kids into zombies’, etc.), but also because the growth of new technologies has outpaced research efforts.

Lisa Guernsey, now Director of the New America Foundation’s Early Education Initiative, and previously a reporter at the New York Times, set out in the early 2000s to understand what hard research says about exposing kids to media (her efforts culminated in a widely praised book called Screen Time.) Guernsey recently sat down with Angela Santomero, co-creator of the long-running Nickelodeon children’s show Blue’s Clues, and offered a series of helpful, evidence-based recommendations to parents with young children:

View the video here.

Edit: We’ve updated the video link, as the old one stopped working.“