my daughter LOVES apps and videos having to do with letters, but I worry about screen time. I know the AAP have lifted the zero to 2 screen time ban, and many say it can be good for kids - but what are your limits with your gifted kids? She could watch them for hours if I let her. What do you think is a good limit? She does indeed learn a TON while watching.
Although a common misconception, AAP has not lifted the zero to 2 screen time ban.
Television and other entertainment media should be avoided for infants and children under age 2. A child's brain develops rapidly during these first years, and young children learn best by interacting with people, not screens.
See it here:
https://www.aap.org/en-us/advocacy-and-policy/aap-health-initiatives/pages/media-and-children.aspxFurther, they recommend less than 2 hours a day of total screen time for children and teens.
Children and teens should engage with entertainment media for no more than one or two hours per day, and that should be high-quality content. It is important for kids to spend time on outdoor play, reading, hobbies, and using their imaginations in free play.
The consensus among researchers is that the best outcomes for children, especially young children, come from traditional, free form play. Think blocks (you can make anything!), dolls (you can pretend anything!), paper (you can make and pretend anything!), coloring (you can draw anything and then pretend any story!) combined with interacting with real people (they have feelings and won't always do what you want!).
Additionally, IMO, there is good research based evidence that some children may be more vulnerable than others to negative impacts from environmental factors. Sadly, there is not currently any way to tell if a specific child will be impacted and the negative impacts may not be visible for years. I haven't seen research on it, but IMO, screen learning for small children may also delay learning how to learn from live human teachers.
With my own DD and her friends, we saw that screen time had the most impact on what they weren't doing instead. No building imperfect doll houses out of bark, or having pretend picnics with fake food made out of dandelions, when you can sit in front of a screen and have someone else do all the heavy lifting of imagining the story for you. Also less reading, less lego building, less talking to real people, when the entertaining screen is so much easier. The kiddos with less screen time were much better at imagining a story and finding things to do.