2 to 4 is still early in the development of physical attributes, focus, hand eye coordination, balance and what have you. Zero intentional and structured screen time seems entirely appropriate. Let them develop a physical world and interact with it before encouraging screen addicted couch potato. That will come despite best efforts later...
But why do you believe this? Encouraging physical world interaction before screen interaction (I'm taking away the value judgements) – what makes you think that this is beneficial? What are the benefits? How would changing this change the outcome of the child's life?
One theory I have found pieces of and put together is that a primary pillar of mental health is how your life experience as an adult matches your life experience as a child. If most of us are going to spend a significant amount of our lives glued to screens in order to be productive members of society, at least introducing that early might make the matching experience more tolerable.
Simple. The schools when our kids were young encouraged plenty of screen time, from age 5 on -- we both wanted a more balanced mix. Plenty of time for life as viewer and visual consumer later. Playing out, football, swimming and forests as well as viewer to be data mined to death. We both chose to put the screens aside when the kids were toddlers. T'was pre smartphone and tablet anyway.
It's not like they had any chance of lacking screen time through their childhood with schools as they are. Nor were they deprived access, or lacked natural ability come 5 and 6 on... Or lacked inclination to become addicted to WoW come 13 or 14.
I'm not sure what you mean with your point about "life experience as an adult matches your life experience as a child". Maybe I'm completely missing it. For any of us born before the home computer revolution of the 1980s, childhood and work are likely dramatically different things. I'd rather the kids get a chance to be children than start preparing them for a life of work at age 2 or 4...
Expanding on this to postulate: This is why old fairy-tales were so dark and frightening. Scary stories prepare you for a scary world, which it definitely was not so long ago. Many of the feedback systems in your brain are trained in childhood and become much more fixed as an adult. Homeostasis trained on the "child" dataset goes all out of order on the "adult" dataset when the two are too different.
Lavish your child with praise and attention, everything they could want and making sure everyone is successful at everything and never "fails" ... come to the real world as an adult and reality isn't as nice, the world isn't actually like what you grew up in and your feedback systems simply aren't equipped or designed to handle the situation life puts you in.
Do you have studies to prove that zero screen time is beneficial? I have a two year old who has learnt plenty from his screen time - between 15m to 30m per day.
Anecdata - my kid is the same. She’s 22 months and can sing all the usual songs and names her shapes and colors aloud with the videos. It’s impressive and she can count like crazy from all of it (and out of order so it’s not _just_ rote memorization in order).
We do push it at times when we are traveling or she’s sick where she will get 2-4 hours of iPad and videos along with her books. She will also pick a book over the iPad almost every time the choice is available so I am not worried (yet).
