This anti-TV meme is mostly luddite fearmongering intended to get joe and jane sixpack to stop vegging out in front of the TV and start being engaged as parents.
That is not what the Academy of Pediatrics is actually saying. They specifically say that you as the parent is not required to engage with your child the whole time - however if you are NOT engaged with them, you are still better having the TV off, because children gain valuable skills from solitary play.
In other words, it's not a simplistic case of "Parents better than TV"; it really is a case of "no TV better than TV".
Obviously with all these things, quantity does matter.
I should add the other benefit of no screen time before two: when you finally do introduce programming, at least in my experience, kids are far more highly engaged with it, so when you expose them to it later it seems to "take" better. Anecdotally, the kids who are exposed to it as babies seem to also not to focus attentively on it when they are older, so if you do want to take advantage of the screen's great educational potential (not talking about the Baby Einstein crap), you do seem to be better off holding off for the first couple of years.
But couldn't some programming be beneficial and some harmful?
It just seems like quite an oversimplification to say that all TV is neutral or harmful to development.
My kid is 15 months and we occasionally play "signing time" sign language training DVDs. She's learned a lot of spoken vocabulary from it, and appears to be in the 99th percentile for language development. She doesn't typically sign anything (except for milk) but the other day I asked her what the sign is for a few things and she actually seems to know them.
There is no way to tell for certain, but I credit the signing time videos with giving her a very clear sense of core (verbal and signed) language symbolism. The repetition of words, signs, and pictures has always seemed quite interesting to her, with the less familiar, more abstract words/concepts initially seeming a bit less interesting and subsequently gaining significance as her overall awareness improved.
I have noticed on the few occasions when we've had a movie or show on the TV when she's been around that she'll initially pay close attention to it and then after a minute or two begin to stare blankly at it... this is quite the opposite reaction she has to the signing time videos.
So to summarize I'm skeptical that it makes sense to generalize too much about the specific age ranges when kids are "ready" for various stimuli. I think that metaphor is stretched too far. Instead, a child will find certain stimuli intensely interesting (including some stuff that may be on a TV). To the extent that the child can conceptualize the structure of the stimulus enough to provoke learning, the stimulus can be considered "good" or beneficial to learning. But the developing brain will also get overwhelmed, so after a certain point even a good stimulus becomes noise and can only lead the child to exert effort to tune it out, which would use up cognitive effort for something without any learning benefit.
Hah not trying to argue for anything based on the anecdote, just using it to suggest that the premises of the study might not be all that realistic. It's easy to get caught up in the result of an official sounding study which may actually be ill-conceived.
That is not what the Academy of Pediatrics is actually saying. They specifically say that you as the parent is not required to engage with your child the whole time - however if you are NOT engaged with them, you are still better having the TV off, because children gain valuable skills from solitary play.
In other words, it's not a simplistic case of "Parents better than TV"; it really is a case of "no TV better than TV".
Obviously with all these things, quantity does matter.
I should add the other benefit of no screen time before two: when you finally do introduce programming, at least in my experience, kids are far more highly engaged with it, so when you expose them to it later it seems to "take" better. Anecdotally, the kids who are exposed to it as babies seem to also not to focus attentively on it when they are older, so if you do want to take advantage of the screen's great educational potential (not talking about the Baby Einstein crap), you do seem to be better off holding off for the first couple of years.