4 hours a day? That’s a crazy amount of time. Interact with your damn kids.

Oh look, a buried lede:

They noted that the babies exposed to more screen time were children of younger first-time mothers who had lower household incomes, lower maternal education levels, and suffered from postpartum depression.

There are plausible mechanisms of action proposed here but their >2 hours/day sub-samples were small, baseline risk of developmental delay very low (5%), and it is essentially impossible to control for all the factors which are associated with more screen time. The effects they're reporting here (of the order of 5% absolute difference) are not large compared to the influence of socioeconomic factors on these outcomes.

Full paper here with free pdf download for nicer format.

So, for all the parents out there who have little choice but to have a screen keep your kids occupied while you deal with everything else life is throwing at you, don't let this report load you up with more guilt. Get some quality time with them when you can and choose children's programming which uses and teaches proper language (Sesame Street, not the Teletubbies). But you're doing little to no harm however you choose to manage it.

4 hours a day for a baby!? Mother of fuck

Others have pointed out that the article is jumping to conclusions by excluding the very and actually well documented economic factors at play here.

It is crunchy/granola technophobia. People need to keep in mind that popular (scientific, for the time) opinion used to be that excessive reading was had for children and adults. It is as old as our written records actually, going back to a handful of Greek historians warning about it even.

If people wanted the best for babies then we’d be raising them in collectives, with multigenerational households being the norm and free food, healthcare, and childcare widely available with few string attached. Some places already are close to all of those things.

But it is so much easier to clutch pearls and blame the iPad. It isn’t like brains shut off. They also used to argue that video games causes inadequate social and motor skill development and now fucking surgeons play games to build motor skills.

I’m sure we’ll hear that screentime proclaims “hail Satan” just as soon as they find a way to play the iPad in reverse.