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Infants and toddlers learn more from interaction with their parents and other caregivers than they do watching infant-directed educational content.

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Infants and toddlers spend 1 to 2 hours a day engaged with screen media, including television and tablets, and are exposed to over 5 hours daily of background television intended for adults (Courage, 2017). Infant-directed videos and programming, which offer educational content embedded in an engaging video format, are often advertised as aids to babies’ brain development, intelligence, and learning (Fenstermacher et al., 2010; Vaala & LaPierre, 2014). Most parents believe that age-appropriate videos can have a positive impact on early child development while providing good entertainment for babies and convenience for parents (Robb, Richert, & Wartella, 2009). Certainly, even very young infants attend to video material, as its movement, color, and rapid scene changes are attractive (Courage, 2017).

But do baby videos really aid development? Brain-building claims made by baby media manufacturers are not supported by longitudinal studies, which offer no evidence of long-term benefits of media use in early childhood (American Academy of Pediatrics Council on Communications and Media, 2016; Courage & Howe, 2010; Ferguson & Donnellan, 2014). For example, one study tested a popular DVD program that claims to help young infants learn to read. Ten- to 18-month-old infants who regularly watched the program for 7 months did not differ from other infants in intelligence, cognitive skills, reading skill, or word knowledge (Neuman, Kaefer, Pinkham, & Strouse, 2014). Baby videos are often advertised as aiding language development, yet several studies found that children under 2 years of age showed no learning of target words after viewing a language-learning DVD up to 20 times (DeLoache et al., 2010; Ferguson & Donnellan, 2014).

Infants learn more readily from people than from TV, a finding known as the video deficit effect (Anderson & Pempek, 2005). For example, when 12- to 18-month-old infants watched a best-selling DVD that labels household objects, the infants learned very little from it compared with what they learned though interaction with parents (DeLoache et al., 2010). Recently, the video deficit effect has been relabeled as a transfer deficit because infants are less able to transfer what they see on the screen to their own behavior than to transfer what they learn in active interactions with adults (Barr, 2010). The transfer deficit is reduced somewhat for older infants when their memory capacities are taken into account, that is, when content is repeated and verbal cues are added (Barr, 2013). When parents watch videos along with their infants and talk to them about the content, the infants spend more time looking at the screen, learn more from the media, and show greater knowledge of language as toddlers (Linebarger & Vaala, 2010). However, it is not clear that parent coviewing of media provides a better alternative to learning than parent–infant interaction by itself (Courage, 2017).

Infants learn from contingent interactions with others—and baby videos do not provide contingent stimulation. Infants can, however, can learn from screens when contingent interactions with people are involved (McClure, Chentsova-Dutton, Holochwost, Parrott, & Barr, 2018). For example, 12- to 25-month-olds were presented with on-screen partners who taught novel words, actions, and patterns via real-time FaceTime conversations or prerecorded videos (Myers, LeWitt, Gallo, & Maselli, 2017). All of the infants were attentive and responsive, but only children in the FaceTime group responded to the partner in a time-synchronized manner. One week later, the children in the FaceTime group preferred and recognized their partner, learned more novel patterns, and (among the older infants) learned more novel words. Although baby media will not transform babies into geniuses or even guarantee learning, babies can learn from real-time interactions with others—in person or on screen.