When parents think about the impact of screens, we tend to think first of older kids — the teenagers glued to social media, the adolescents clamoring for smartphones, the elementary-age kids logging hours on Minecraft. But recent research points to a surge in screen use among a different, much younger demographic: children under the age of 2.
A 2025 Pew Research Center study found that 62 percent of parents say their children under age 2 watch YouTube — up from 45 percent of parents who said the same in 2020. Thirty-five percent of parents of this age cohort said their babies or toddlers watch YouTube daily. Pew also tracked a steep rise in the number of parents who say their child under the age of 2 watches TV — from 63 percent in 2020 to 82 percent last year.
Even if parents are driving these changes, they aren’t necessarily happy about it: Pew’s research has consistently found that screen time is a rising source of anxiety for parents, and the recent study found that a quarter of parents of children under age 2 said they felt they could be doing a better job managing their child’s screen time.
The findings caught the eye of Rebecca Parlakian, senior director of programs with the organization Zero to Three, a nonpartisan, research-based nonprofit focused on the healthy development of infants, toddlers and families. She spoke to The Post about the implications of rising screen use among very young children. The following conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
How have you seen the use of screens among very young children changing in recent years?
There has been a notable shift toward babies and toddlers accessing short-form videos, and this is a significant shift in moving away from, let’s say, a 30-minute television program where now you’re watching shorter-form video on sites like YouTube. We know that children’s mix of media is now predominantly YouTube or streaming platforms versus “watching television,” like a lot of us grew up on.
And we know that for babies and toddlers, they’re primarily accessing YouTube through their parents’ account. Which means two things: That there’s going to be fewer controls on what is served up to them subsequently, and that they’re watching these videos that give them quick dopamine hits of pleasure. They’re having highly curated childhoods in the way they access screened media. We have to think about that: Who is curating it? And what is being served up to our very young children?
What do we know about the way this kind of screen exposure affects babies and very young toddlers?
We know there’s a strong correlation between high screen media consumption and delayed language development. We also know that if children are consuming educational media, we don’t see that relationship. There are a few trusted outlets — Fred Rogers, PBS — and when children watch that, we don’t see those correlations.
But so much of what children are consuming is not educational. And when I say “educational,” I’m very cautious about it because we have to understand that from a parent’s perspective, everything on YouTube is tagged as learning-oriented, but there are no standards that content creators have to demonstrate or have to meet in order to tag themselves as learning-oriented. And with streaming services, you have to be a lot more vigilant, because we know there are issues — for instance, embedded ads often contain inappropriate content.
There’s also the crowd-out hypothesis: When children are watching screens, what are they not doing, what is getting crowded out? Is it playtime with 3D objects in the real world? Is it interactions with playmates and siblings? There’s a lot of concern that children are just not having access to the experiences that they’re wired to need.
The Pew study found that the vast majority of parents of toddlers (95 percent) were watching YouTube with their kids — can you talk about why that matters, and what effect that has?
That’s a really good point. Babies and toddlers struggle with something called transfer of learning. Transfer of learning means, “I learn something while I’m looking at the screen, but I lack the symbolic and conceptual and cognitive skills to transfer that learning from a 2D screen to a 3D world.” But research has shown that if parents are there to mediate and coach, children do better at transfer of learning. Now, it’s always better to just play with things in the real world — but if you are choosing to offer your child a screened media experience, as so many of us did and do, then watching with them is better. When you co-view, you can do a couple of things: When something happens on the screen, you can say, “Oh my gosh, that dragon looks so frightened! Let’s see what happens.” We’re naming the emotions, we’re adding vocabulary, we’re helping children understand the narrative that they’re seeing unfold on the screen. We can also ask our children questions, like “Oh my gosh, what do you think is in the box?” That encourages back-and-forth interaction. There’s a lot that parents can do to make it a better learning experience.
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends avoiding screen media before the age of 18 months. But if parents are going to offer some form of screen experience, what are the best options?
The number one best screened experience for young children is video chat — with grandma, with aunts and uncles, with family. Video chat has been shown to help children build relationships. They recognize and become familiar with who they chat with, so it’s great for distant family and friends, and it’s a wonderful, interactive medium.
Other than that, I would say that anything that you’re choosing from a trusted, educational media source would be the next best choice, because those trusted sources are actually developing content in partnership with curriculum specialists, so there are learning objectives for each unit that are actually mapped out across a season, and that’s really important.
And then I would say, for toddlers, they can gain perhaps some early skills from interacting with age-appropriate games, and we know that gaming is increasing in popularity in that age range.
What are the factors that you think are driving more parents of very young children to incorporate screens into their parenting, even if it’s something they’re not entirely comfortable with?
I bring so much compassion to parents for this dilemma. Because I truly believe that if “Bluey” had been available in a sod house on the prairie in the 1800s, parents would have used it then, too. Parents use the tools that are available to them. And now the environment is such that parents are reporting higher stress levels than ever before, and we know that many parents are two-income, working families, so there’s a lot to do in a short period of time. And we know that screens are incredibly enchanting to children, as they are to us as adults. So parents may be like “Well, I need a tool, I need something for my child to do,” but then the serotonin hits, the dopamine hits are there, children are so enchanted with the screen, and then it becomes a perpetuating cycle where children are demanding it and parents are getting exhausting constantly setting limits. I think this is really a systemic issue. It’s a really hard thing, and there are no easy answers.
What would you say to parents who want to step back from screen time with very young children, but might find that prospect daunting?
It’s really important to sit down and really be aligned with all the caregivers in your life, because you want everyone to agree on what the approach is going to be. The American Academy of Pediatrics actually has a lovely media plan tool for parents, to help families think about when they want to watch screens, and think about what content they are going to allow their children to consume, and be thoughtful and conscious about that. Parents can think about: What are the family routines that we want to embed, what kind of childhood do we want our children to have, what memories do we want to give our child about what it was like to grow up in our family?
If you’re trying to step back from screens, initial pushback is going to happen. The screen is so easy, but when a toddler says they’re bored, and you’ve decided that screens are not going to be the solution for that, and now they’re wandering the house whining like a Victorian ghost — you have to be prepared that there’s going to be this extinction burst, and be prepared to work through that. But they can adjust, and it’s not too late to make a change.
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