Kids under two should be free of TV...

A visiting international childhood expert says children should watch no television in the first two years of their lives.

The director of the Centre on Media and Child Health at the Harvard Medical School, Dr Michael Rich, says there is little benefit in putting a child under the age of two in front of a TV screen.

"There is no scientific evidence that children under the age of about 30 months, two-and-a-half years, can learn much of anything other than fairly rote imitation or mimicry from an electronic screen," he told ABC radio's The World Today program.

"What we know is that at least for national data from the United States that children under the age of two on average use electronic games for about an hour, a little over an hour a day," he said. 

"[We know] that 26 per cent of them have a television in their bedrooms and that it is very much integrated into their daily lives, largely in the format of parents using the television as an electronic babysitter." More...

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