[medler]

A brief summary of what this study was about:

- screen time was reported by parents at 12 months

- television was the only screen time experienced by the vast majority of subjects (they explain that this was around 2010, before handheld devices were ubiquitous)

- they found that at 9 years old, the children who had had more screen time at 12 months had worse attention and executive functioning at 9 years

- EEG correlates at 18 months explained some of those differences at 9 years

- this is in Singapore btw

What blew me away was that in this cohort, the average (average!) reported TV time for the 12-month-olds time was 2 hours a day!

[in_cahoots]

I was surprised at the 2 hour number too, but then I remembered that there are a ton of stay at home moms or parents on parental leave who have the tv on all day for background noise. Being home alone all day can be isolating, and for some people the ‘company’ of a tv breaks up that isolation.