>A child's brain develops rapidly during these first years, and young children learn best by interacting with people, not screens Whilst probably true in isola

>A child's brain develops rapidly during these first years, and young children learn best by interacting with people, not screens Whilst probably true in isolation, this is rather a false dichotomy. You could equally say that kids learn better by interacting with people than with cuddly toys, so we shouldn't let kids have them either. Having a child watch TV,or play with a doll or an iPad, doesn't mean you will now stop talking to your children, and parents aren't going to be spending every single waking second talking to their kids. So the question that should be asked is whether TVs and iPads are better or worse for kids than the other things that they could be doing during the times that the parents isn't going to be actively interacting with them - things like playing with their dolls, crawling around the house, listening to music, sitting and staring out the window etc. And I'm guessing that the answer to that question is that they aren't intrinsically particularly better or worse than any of those other things, and that the problem comes when you let any one activity be the default way of keeping the kids quiet. Of course there are parents who replace any actual human interaction with 18 hours of TV a day. But the problem there isn't really the TV. If you took that away, it probably wouldn't be replaced with human interaction. They'd just find some other way to keep the kids quiet that didn't give them much stimulation either.