Screen time for babies includes any exposure to a television, smartphone, tablet, or computer screen, whether your baby is actively watching or the screen is simply on in the background. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that screen time be very limited for children under 2, with video chatting as the one notable exception. But the definition is broader than most parents realize, and understanding what counts can help you make better choices during those early months and years.
What Counts as Screen Time
The obvious forms are easy to spot: handing your baby a phone to watch a video, putting on a children’s show, or letting them tap at an app on a tablet. But screen time also includes less obvious exposures. A TV playing in the background while your baby plays on the floor counts. So does scrolling through your phone while your baby sits in your lap, or having a movie on during dinner. Even electronic toys with built-in screens fall under the umbrella of screen-based media.
Researchers classify digital play into several categories: traditional non-electronic toys, battery-powered toys without screens, digital toys with computer technology but no screen, and digital screen toys or devices like tablets and smartphones. If it has a screen displaying moving images or interactive content, it’s screen time, regardless of whether the product is marketed as a toy.
E-books on tablets also count, and they may not be as beneficial as you’d expect. A study of parent-toddler reading sessions found that parents engaged in nearly twice as much meaningful conversation with their children when reading print books compared to enhanced electronic books. Parents asked fewer questions, made fewer comments about the story, and read less of the actual text when using a tablet. The interactive features of e-books, like sound effects and animations, appeared to distract from the kind of back-and-forth conversation that builds language skills.
Why Video Chat Is the Exception
Video calls with grandparents or other family members are treated differently from other screen media for children under 2. The reason comes down to one key feature: video chat allows real-time, two-way social interaction. Your baby can respond and get an immediate reaction back, which mirrors the way in-person conversations work.
This matters because the back-and-forth quality of an interaction is what drives early learning. Research on video chat and young children has found that these contingent social exchanges, where responses are both timely and relevant, support word learning, turn-taking, and emotional connections with family members. A pre-recorded video, no matter how “educational,” can’t respond to your baby’s babbling or follow their gaze. Video chat can, at least partially, which is why pediatric guidelines carve out this specific exception.
Why Background TV Matters More Than You Think
Many parents assume that if a baby isn’t staring at the screen, the TV isn’t affecting them. The research tells a different story. Background television has been linked to reduced language development and weaker self-regulation skills in young children, likely because it changes how parents and babies interact with each other.
Home observation studies have found that when a TV is on in the background, babies spend less time in three-way interactions, the kind where a caregiver and baby explore an object or activity together. Instead, babies spend more time playing alone. Those three-way interactions, where you and your baby jointly focus on something and talk about it, are among the most powerful drivers of early cognitive and language growth. Background TV quietly disrupts them.
“Educational” Content Doesn’t Help Infants
Products marketed as educational for babies are a massive industry, but the evidence behind them is thin to nonexistent. A study tracking children from 6 months to 14 months found no measurable cognitive or language benefits from exposure to educational content designed for young children. The only type of content that showed a clear association with development was adult-oriented programming, which was linked to lower cognitive and language scores.
This finding directly contradicts the claims made by many baby media brands. The study’s authors noted that their results provide no support for developing educational media aimed at infants, even high-quality content designed specifically for them. The core issue is that babies under 2 learn best from live, in-person interactions with people and objects. They have genuine difficulty transferring what they see on a flat screen to the three-dimensional world around them.
This phenomenon, known as the video deficit, is well documented. A large meta-analysis covering children from birth to age 6 found that kids consistently learn about half as well from video as they do from live demonstrations. The gap is largest in the youngest children and narrows with age, which is why the guidelines are strictest for babies and loosen as children grow.
How Screens Affect Baby Sleep
Light plays a central role in establishing your baby’s sleep-wake cycle. Specialized light-sensitive cells in the eyes are functional at birth and send signals to the brain’s internal clock, which regulates the production of melatonin, the hormone that promotes sleep. Bright light suppresses melatonin, and the blue-enriched light from screens is particularly effective at doing so.
For infants, whose circadian rhythms are still developing, artificial light exposure at night can interfere with the process of establishing a stable sleep pattern. Research on light and infant circadian development has found that continuous or poorly timed light exposure can disrupt the proportion of sleep stages, including increasing lighter sleep at the expense of deeper, more restorative phases. Screen use close to bedtime is one of the most common sources of this kind of disruption.
Practical Guidelines by Age
For babies under 18 months, the recommendation is to avoid screen media other than video chatting. This isn’t about being rigid or making parents feel guilty for occasionally needing a distraction. It’s based on consistent evidence that babies this young simply don’t benefit from screens and may be subtly harmed by them, particularly through lost opportunities for the face-to-face interaction that fuels their development.
Between 18 and 24 months, if you choose to introduce media, the guidance shifts toward co-viewing: watching together and actively talking about what’s on screen. Children this age still struggle to learn from screens on their own, but an engaged adult can bridge the gap by pointing things out, asking questions, and connecting what’s on screen to real life. This kind of scaffolding helps toddlers begin to make sense of two-dimensional content.
Effective co-viewing means more than just sitting next to your child. It means following their interests, asking open-ended questions like “What do you think will happen next?” and linking what you see to their own experiences. If you’re watching something about animals, you might talk about the dog you saw at the park earlier that day. The goal is to turn a passive experience into an interactive one, which is what young brains are wired to learn from.
What to Prioritize Instead
Children under 2 learn best from exploring their physical environment and interacting with the people around them. Stacking blocks, turning pages of a board book together, playing peekaboo, or simply narrating what you’re doing while you cook dinner all provide the kind of rich, responsive input that screens cannot replicate. The research consistently shows that adult scaffolding, where you guide your child’s attention and respond to their cues, is especially important for this age group to acquire and retain new information.
Print books, in particular, outperform their digital counterparts for this age. The lack of bells and whistles turns out to be a feature, not a bug. Without animations and sound effects competing for attention, parents naturally engage in more of the dialogic reading that builds vocabulary: asking questions, elaborating on the story, and connecting it to the child’s own life. A simple board book read together provides more developmental value than the most sophisticated baby app on the market.