How Harmful to Babies Is It to Have the TV on in the Background?

My husband likes to watch the news in the background all morning and at dinnertime. We typically don’t let our son watch TV shows, but the TV is always on when my husband is in charge. (This, on its own, is a huge source of stress in my marriage — we totally disagree.) I’ve seen some studies that this is generally bad for kids’ development, speech, and focus while playing, but my kid is pretty ahead by all measures in those areas, so my husband isn’t convinced and won’t budge.

One thing I haven’t been able to find is at what age the specific images on the news may become disturbing for my son. The news can be so graphic and upsetting. At what age will he start to understand, and is there any data that can help me convince my husband to turn the TV off? If he won’t, just how damaging might it be?
—Georgie

I read two questions here, one specific and one more general.

On your second, specific question about when kids absorb TV, our best evidence comes from asking when they can learn from TV. The answer to that is that learning from videos seems to appear sometime in the 2- to 3-year-old range. We know from research on Baby Einstein videos and similar that babies do not learn from videos. They can’t learn to talk based on TV and, by extension, probably absorb little of the news. By the 3 to 5 age range, we know from research on Sesame Street that kids clearly can learn things from TV. Good things (like the letter of the day!) and, possibly, bad things, too.

Red analog televisions are arranged on a yellow background. — Getty Images

This is all a continuum, of course, so it’s not that as soon as they turn 2, things change, but that gives you a range.

The bigger general issue here, though, is that you disagree on the TV policy. I do not want to overinterpret, but it feels to me like your specific age question is looking for a reason not to have the TV on. You can’t use the “our child is behind” reason because he’s not, but maybe there is another possible reason?

A perfectly valid reason for not having the TV on is that it isn’t how you think the household should be. You can feel that it takes away from interactions either with your child or each other. If this is the case, you might want less TV even if there are no impacts on your child.It seems like the first-order thing here is to have a longer family discussion about the TV policy. You and your husband disagree. In an ideal world, you would work out those disagreements directly. And maybe do it now because eventually your kid will absorb what’s on television.