Experts Rip 'Sesame' TV Aimed at Tiniest Tots

Baby Einstein logged retail sales of $200 million in 2005.

Kaiser reported that 68 percent of children under 2 view two hours of television daily and only 6 percent of parents know of the pediatrician group's no-TV recommendation, which it adopted in 1999.

"Kids that age are only awake 12 hours a day, so we have a generation of children who are watching television 10-20 percent of their waking lives -- and that's a dramatic increase," says pediatrician Dimitri Christakis, director of the Child Health Institute at the University of Washington in Seattle, whose research has found that early exposure to television could prove detrimental to attention span and cognitive development.

Other research suggests that television viewing by babies could harm language development and sleep patterns. And there's the "instead-of" caveat -- babies and toddlers glued to the tube aren't doing other healthy activities such as creative play and interacting with parents.

Truglio of Sesame Workshop points out that the DVD scenes were designed "to model parent-child interaction and to have that interaction around everyday routine moments."

Zero to Three's decision to work with Sesame was carefully considered, says the group's executive director, Matthew Melmed. The deal includes no financial gain for Zero to Three other than payment for time its staff spent on the project, he said. And it was agreed that the DVDs wouldn't be called educational.

"If we are going to promote healthy development, we have to find ways to connect with parents in ways that meet them in their daily realities," he says, adding that today's parents have grown up with electronic media and don't see television as necessarily bad.

"We can't be in a position saying no to parents because they'll ignore you. We want to say to parents, 'If you chose to have your very young children exposed to this type of media, let's at least have something that is appropriate,' " Melmed says.

"A lot of what we do goes back to what Ben Spock said 50 years ago: 'Trust yourself -- you know your baby better than anybody else.' "

But CCFC's Linn isn't buying it. "Their argument that parents are already doing it doesn't wash. One thing we know is that parents are going to be struggling with kids about media for the rest of their childhoods. Why in the world would anyone suggest parents put their kids in front of the TV before kids even ask for it?"