12-18 months was a challenging age for us.
I tried to interest DS(now 2.7) in TV or videos about then because after hours and hours of high demand parenting I was hoping for a break. He would just walk over and turn it off and go find another book for me to read. The guilt of that ! I felt like I was a drug pusher.
Now at 2.7 his favorite TV is the BBC documentary Walking With Dinosaurs, he watches probably 45 min of it a day starting about 9pm. He wants to watch that instead of other options like Clifford. He loved Starfall when he was younger, spending nearly an hour a day total on there (starting somewhere in the 16-19 month range), but finished with it by around 2.3 once he'd learned to read. He does still love his Zac and Peg characters (they sell them on the website, stuffed toys), he just makes them act out his own stories now. He'll play on starfall if I suggest it but it's not something he thinks of to do. Seems like these things run their course.
I can't see the harm in 15 minutes of Starfall or even a half hour of TV at a year old. Not of course for kids that are calmly staring at a wall -- where I live I seem to meet a lot of infants and toddlers who are quite content to sit and stare at hardly anything, and in that situation TV or it's more interactive cousin computer websites seem like they would just make it easy to ignore the child for longer. But for kids that sleep less and do far more per minute already than other kids a little bit of computer games or TV seems harmless.
Polly
