DD3.5 has been having screen time, since pretty early. But highly regulated and moderated and we used to watch and sing with her. During her toddler days, she watched quite a few age-appropriate rhymes and animated songs with us. At 19 months, she could sing (pretty clearly) more than two lines of several rhymes. And she was speaking in compound sentences by 21 months.
Now at 3Y9M, she’s highly selective on what she watches on TV or what she plays on iPad – she will ignore them if we tune into something she’s not interested in. So she is kind of self-regulating herself when it comes to screen time. We follow her lead.
She craves for variety and challenge – so she’s automatically bored of screen-time beyond a limit and wants to move on to something “more interesting”.
Her current obsession is Dinosaurs and she watches the Amazon Original “Dino Dana”, which has suddenly reignited her Dinosaur obsession.
The series is meant for older kids, but she has already memorized the story of each of the 13 episodes and names every dinosaur that appears in every episode. And that includes names like Deinosuchus, Brachiosaurus, Incisivosaurus pronounced with precision. She wakes in the middle of the night and sleepily talks about Futalognkosaurus. (She’s generally a very light sleeper and finds it hard to calm herself down into a sleep, as her mind is nearly overstimulated ALL the time.)
"Visually Intense" seems to be her criteria for learning stimulation. Be it on TV, iPad or books.
She loves spending time on books which are visually intense (and tends to show less interest on other books). Her current book obsession (in case you didn’t already guess) - National Geographic Little Kids First Big Book of Dinosaurs. It’s very visual, lots of amazing images, and (of course) it’s about Dinosaurs.
