As I said earlier, Mr. Rogers’ Neighorhood, for example was meant for children aged 2 and up.
"Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood is a “television visit” between Mister Rogers and his young viewers. The series is geared primarily to 2 to 5 year olds, but appropriate for all ages. "
http://www.pbs.org/parents/rogers/series/summary.html
This show started production in 1968 and ended in 2001, although reruns probably still air. Sesame Street is also for toddlers and preschoolers.
I would posit that grabbing the mobile is a separate but CLOSELY RELATED task.
My baby is currently 10 months old, so this is fresh in my mind. I observed the changes in how she reacted to her mobile as she grew.
At first, like Manda JO’s baby (and congrats, by the way! 
) she just liked to look at it. As she got older, she would try to grab it because she didn’t understand that it was far away from her. Then she stopped grabbing it for a little while. Now she knows that when I’m holding her is her window of opportunity to grab for it, and you can see her anticipate this as we head toward the crib. She learned to wait for the right moment. This is where I feel like she developed a visual skill and a movement skill in conjunction with each other.
It was also a kick to watch her figure out, over a period of time, that the mobile was the same object whether she was looking at from below (when she was in the crib) or from the side (when I was holding her next to the crib).
All of this happened over time, and why I believe watching the mobile is fundamentally different from watching TV.
She doesn’t have ZERO tv, but she has very little tv. I figure she watches enough “accidental TV” (when I am watching the weather forecast, when we are visiting people with older children who are watching tv, etc) that she doesn’t need any additional tv on purpose.
Two hours seems like a lot for a baby that age, unless:
a) it’s two hours broken up over the day (i.e. a few mintues here, a few minutes there)
or
b) you’re watching with your baby and interacting while the shows are on.
I admit my husband and I do this with our son - usually he watches hockey games with my husband and he seems to get quite into it. Now, it’s pretty interactive, lots of cheering and hand clapping and talking about what the players are doing as opposed to just passive sitting.
Junior and I watched the Princess Bride on the weekend and it was the same sort of thing - he particularly enjoyed the fencing scenes. (As in, he pointed at the TV and went OOOOOO. )
He’s 16 months, FWIW.
Honestly, though, I don’t think he watched much TV at all before age 1 - he had one of those play saucers (you know, with animals, and toys and music etc) that I would stash him in when I needed to go pee, or make lunch or whatever.
I guess I think it doesn’t really matter what the child is doing as long as you’re interacting and talking to him or her while they’re doing it.
They say that if you are planning to have kids, you should visit a family with young children and tell the parents what they are doing wrong… because once you have children you will never be right again.
IMHO (never having kids) “everything in moderation”.
Children learn language and other skills, including how to manipulate adults to get their way, by interaction. A passive device like a TV probably does not really develop language skills, just as it won’t teach them properly how to share or play nice later in childhood no matter how many Barney programs about that they get to watch.
Videogames don’t teach people how to interact because live human responses are more complex and unpredictable (and illogical, captain) than computer programs. You have to experience that for yourself, the hard way. Some things need more real-life interactive experience.
Ultimately, this is up to the parent to decide. Everyone will tell you something different. Good luck.
Delphica had an interesting description of the process just now. But a TV’s movement and quick change from one picture to another does not help a baby figure out objects. There are zillions of great science-for-laypeople books out there about baby development, language acquisition, and all that. I mentioned NurtureShock above, which is a pretty new book describing interesting (and surprising) discoveries we’ve been making about child development at all ages, and it has some good stuff about language and learning in babies. Lots of others will give you the best information we have about this stuff, so visit your friendly neighborhood public library.
My library is my cite! 
This is another really good point. TV is designed to grab your attention–the movement and flashes engage your most primal instincts (the ones designed to detect tigers) and don’t let you go. A little kid–heck, many adults, including me–is held by that and doesn’t get to choose to look away; it’s not necessarily very voluntary.
When my kids were little, I found that I had to limit them to about 20 minutes a day in the preschool years. More than that, and they got grumpy and fractious. The less TV they watched, the happier they were, and the easier they were to handle.
Ah, that old hoary saw. Very funny for people who want to defend that they do their parenting by feel instead of looking at what scientists have found out in the last 100+ years.
The issue for toddlers below 2 years is neurological development, not delayment of speech.
A judgement call about all video games is even more off the mark than with TV. There are quite good video games out there - but not for toddlers or 6-year olds.
Yes, and when you have a medical problem, you don’t need science, either. Just try what your great-grandparents did. / sarcasm
One, is it really necessary to say things like “throw doubts on your own reasoning facilities” in GQ? I’m not an idiot. This isn’t GD, I’m not advocating a position, I’m asking a question. I also don’t see how it’s “anti-science” to wonder what characteristics of TV cause problems: is it something inherent to television or a quality shared by all passive “baby distractors”?
My question isn’t “is TV ok, because a mobile is?”. My question is “Everyone acts like TV is this big evil, but mobiles seem potentially evil by the same criteria. Are they really any better?”. There is something to be said for the idea that kids can reach for a mobile, but at seven weeks that doesn’t make any difference to my kid. Some have said that TV is designed to draw your attention, but that’s true for a mobile as well.
There are even mobiles out there that are projectors that put a flat, glowing circling image on the ceiling. Are those TV?
Manda JO, no mobiles are not much better.
But would you park a baby in front of a mobile for two hours? A mobile is soothing and is boring and it helps a child fall asleep, but it is not stimulating development much. Parked awake in front of one for more than a few minutes a baby will demand more stimulation, real stimulation. Park an awake child in front of one for hours at a time and yeah, you are being neglectful.
The difference is that TV is no better for development than a mobile but it is nevertheless stimulating; you can park a kid there for two hours. Or more. And people do. In half of households with young kids thenTV is always on. It distracts from the real work of childhood - human interaction and actual play. Mobiles … don’t.
Actually, since we are descended into IMHO, the original model for childhood brain development was to sit around and watch and interact with the rest of the village. Modern society, where we spend much of our time locked in our own private home with 0.6 siblings, is a relatively modern conceit (especially the 0.6 siblings). Being plunked in a cage (or, playpen) with nothing but a mobile or a squeaky toy, is about as foreign a concept to child-rearing as TV, or as having your own quiet room with a closed door where you are stuck in a crib to start at a blank ceiling in quietude while mama and papa watch TV in peace.
In past centuries, in the third world, and in hunter-gatherer societies, Junior is carried around by mama or on her back; is watched by one of half a dozen siblings or cousins; interacts with all of them and watches, then acts with, all ranges of people.
Not all of them, actually. A lot of children’s TV from the 50s and 60s was aimed at the preschool demographic, usually defined as being older than toddlers, but younger than five, at which age children typically begin kindergarten. Mister Rogers was definitely aimed at this set, as were Romper Room and Engineer Bill, but those differed from Mr. Rogers in featuring a half-dozen small kids on the set. Games and activities would thus be performed on air as part of the program’s content, perhaps interspersed with cartoons and other entertainment. At the end of every Romper Room episode, the hostess (always female, and often a former kindergarten teacher) would wave her “Magic Mirror” (actually the empty frame of a hand mirror), and pretend to see specific children in “televisionland” who had submitted their first names. (The fact that this didn’t strike people as starkly creepy attests to a far more innocent time). Virtually all these shows imparted behavioral or simple moral lessons, and encouraged their young viewers to be polite and respectful toward adults.
But some of the other shows were defintely aimed at primary school pupils as well; almost by definition anything revolving around reading would have to be.
TVs are harmful even to teenager brains.
Dump it and only have one where they won’t have access to it until they can work and buy their own.
You started calling people not agreeing with your statement “luddite-ish”; and really, if you can’t see the difference between a mobile that’s not-changing and a TV screen where pictures flicker too fast for a developing mind, then I do wonder.
Well, since I already explained twice that the frame change rate of a TV - esp. today, where it’s much faster than in previous decades (as has been, again, measured by scientists) is too fast for a toddlers brain-eye system (again, as measured by scientists, who made great advances in the past decades understanding development of the human brain in early childhood), but you keep on stating that “well all stuff is alike” - then you are basically ignoring scientist findings. That’s why I wondered about anti-science.
Do you honestly not see the difference between a TV programme designed to draw attention, with frame rate, and a mobile? Seriously?
Then I don’t see how anybody can answer your question.
Never seen them, I only know the normal mobiles. But then, I’m not the target demographic to be sold shit labeled misleadingly by companies. Obviously a glowing circle that doesn’t change isn’t the same as an active TV program, but I fail to see the point. Why not get a normal mobile of a few cloth-covered toys?
Or do you mean those half-globes with a light inside that project slowly moving star patterns on the ceiling? Those are intended as night-lights for older children, although of course research shows that sleep without any light source is better (melatonin production). If the light source is low enough not to trigger the brain reflex, it needs to very dim.
It’s probably time to move this over to IMHO.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
As far as the developing visual system goes, a mobile is really different from television. The visual system finalizes wiring itself up with use (there were some interesting studies on kittens looking at this - their visual system is pretty similar to ours- that would be horribly unethical to do in humans), and learning how to interpret shapes, movement, and depth in the real world requires looking at things in the real world that teach you how to interpret them accurately. A mobile provides a constantly-shifting scene in front of the baby that changes depth, changes with the ambient lighting, and lets the baby’s brain interpret which pieces are in front and how they move in space. Not much moves through the 3D environment so differently from normal things (other than leaves, which babies also seem to love looking at), so it seems like a decent visual challenge.
TV, on the other hand, is a flat picture projected on a screen. Without already knowing what the picture is supposed to be, the kid isn’t going to get a whole lot out of it other than getting to look at face-like shapes. It teaches them nothing about how to see their environment, and it doesn’t respond to the environment like a mobile will (grasping if the kid can reach, a breeze, mom and dad manipulating it). TV requires an assumption of an awful lot of visual knowledge, comparatively. It’s flashy and attention-holding, but I don’t see how an undeveloped visual system would get much at all out of it.
I’m not sure of the effect, but I know that when I was young I was in front of the t.v. for many hours of the day. I was not fat, and I went out and played a lot, but I remember watching television from the time I woke up to when I got bored. After I started school, I watched nickelodeon shows when I got home and before I went to bed, with outside play time for however long in between. I don’t remember my mom telling me when I’d had enough t.v. time, but who knows. I did have some anger problems as a child, though I never saw a therapist for it. Maybe there’s a correlation, and I am a Psych major, but I don’t feel like diagnosing myself with a disorder because I watched too much t.v. as a child :P. I have heard the Little Einstein series isn’t actually of any help, so I would look up something on Google about it being no better than regular television. And get your kid outside! That’s the best way to expand their mind and use their imagination to get those neurons firing 
Ah yes, another personal anecdote. Who needs data from scientists doing studies when we have enough people remembering that they grew up with TV and have no problems?
Y’know this is in IMHO now and as such anecdotes are very fair game. And honestly the science on this is not all that solid, lots of associations but very little that solidly demonstrates cause and effect. More what makes developmental sense and extrapolation.
Seven month olds are still sleeping a hefty portion of the day (I think it’s 14-15 hours a day), so they have about 9 hours of time awake. If you take up almost a quarter of that time watching TV, that’s a lot of missed opportunity to interact with people and their environment. Plus, TV can overstimulate some babies, making them irritable, fussy and hard to get to sleep.
I also recall reading somewhere that TV is so passive that it burns just as few calories as sleeping. (At one point many articles said it burned fewer calories than sleeping; however, a Harvard articleI found said it burns just slightly more than sleeping).
Anecdotally, too much TV causes a LOT of behavior issues for my son and has since he was old enough to pay attention to it. Since my husband and I both work, if he watches TV, he doesn’t have time to play. He needs downtime without interruption and without electronics to recharge. We have time for both play and TV on weekends, but not on weekdays. So there’s simply no TV on weekdays.
That said, absolutely no TV before age 2 is difficult to accomplish, especially if you have other kids who are old enough to watch. My daughter just turned 2 and has been in the general vicinity of an “on” TV since she was born. But she’s usually been doing something else instead of watching - she generally plays with her toys near the TV, helps me make breakfast or plays in the kitchen while my son watches TV. I’d say she’ll last about 20 minutes tops - usually just 10 - before she completely loses interest and starts doing something else. It’s exhausting, but I’m kind of glad she’s not interested.
Like +++++
So…are they still doing studies to see if watching a lot of TV before age 2 causes autism?