Too much TV could be harmful to babies.

Byline: THE HEALTH FILES By Tim Christie The Register-Guard

New parents are getting mixed messages about what's best for baby's rapidly developing brain.

On the one hand, marketers of a burgeoning set of videos and DVDs aimed at the drooling set suggest their products can help Junior learn colors, shapes - even provide a foundation for foreign language - at a very young age.

On the other hand, pediatricians, buttressed by new research that links early television exposure with attention problems later in childhood, advise parents not to let babies watch any television for at least the first year of life, and preferably not until they're age 2.

On one point, the marketers and doctors agree: A child's brain undergoes extraordinarily rapid and huge development in the first three years of life, and external stimuli can affect that development.

What's clear as well is that America's children are watching lots of television.

A study last year by the Kaiser Family Foundation reported that children 6 and younger spend an average of two hours a day in front of the television, computer or video game.

Even the youngest children get a steady diet of electronic media: Among children younger than 2, 43 percent watch television every day, and 26 percent have a television in their bedroom. On any given day, 68 percent of children younger than 2 will spend just more than two hours in front of a screen, the study found.

Many of those young eyeballs are watching a rapidly growing genre of entertainment that didn't even exist 10 years ago: baby videos.

The market for these kid vids has exploded in recent years. Business Week reported last year that sales of developmental videos tripled in two years to $700 million.

A glance at the parenting and child-care category of amazon.com confirms these are big sellers: Thirteen of the top 25 selling videos were produced by the Baby Einstein Co.

The American Academy of Pediatrics discourages television viewing for children younger than 2 in favor of activities that promote brain development, such as talking, playing, singing and reading.

Dr. Todd Huffman, a Springfield pediatrician, said he tells new parents no TV for baby - period - in the first year. Parents are better off spending that time reading to their children, he said.

"It's an age of rapid brain development," he said. "Being exposed to rapid-fire imagery - that certainly has to be affecting the way the synaptic connections are developing in a young child's brain."

A study published last April in the journal Pediatrics suggests that the more television infants watch, the more likely they are to develop attention problems later in life.

Researchers looked at a government survey to find out how much TV 1,300 children watched at ages 1 and 3, as reported by their mothers, and then checked their scores on behavior tests at age 7.

The researches found each hour of television a child watched per day, the risk for attention problems increased 10 percent. The study took into account other factors such as prenatal substance abuse by the mother, economic status and whether the baby was born premature.

The study found children watched an average of 2.2 hours of television a day at age 1 and 3.6 hours a day at age 3.

"The general hypothesis underlying all of this is we're born with our brains not fully developed," said Dr. Dimitri Christakis, the study's lead author and pediatrician at Children's Hospital & Regional Medical Center in Seattle.

"The final fine-tuning of the mind occurs in the social context in which children live in the first two to three years," he said.

"In contrast with the pace of how real life unfolds, TV is surreal in the rapidity of scene change," Christakis said. Those images might condition a newborn to expect that high level of stimulation, making everyday life boring by comparison, he said.

Christakis' advice to parents? "The better part of caution is to minimize the amount of television kids watch, then critically ask why are they allowing their children to watch TV."

Christakis acknowledges the study's limitations. It did not evaluate the content of the television children were watching. While it found a correlation or association between early television viewing and later attention problems, that's not the same as finding that TV causes attention problems.

And it was based on an analysis of survey results, a less rigorous scientific method than an experimental study that would, for instance, randomly select two groups of children - one of TV watchers and one of nonviewers - and follow their development over time. (Christakis is currently trying to conduct that kind of study.)

But Christakis said those limitations don't mean the findings should be dismissed. It's widely accepted that smoking causes cancer, even though no scientist ever conducted a randomized control trial to prove it, he said.

It's too soon to say whether studies by Christakis and other researchers on TV's deleterious effects on young minds will ease the demand for baby videos.

The Baby Einstein series, including variations such as Baby Bach, Baby Mozart, Baby Galileo and Baby Van Gogh, are top sellers.

The original Baby Einstein video features images of shapes and patterns and various toys and stuffed animals, with a voices counting and reciting the alphabet in German, Japanese, Hebrew, Russian and French.

"Your child's brain will grow and develop more in the first year of life than at any other time, and you can help nurture that growth and development," the promotional text for Baby Einstein reads.

Baby Einstein officials, who list only their sales number on their Web site, did not return an e-mail seeking comment. The company is now a division of Disney.

At the Brainy Baby Co., an independent Georgia company that markets 13 video titles plus electronic toys, books, games, puzzles and music CDs, company officials tell parents their videos are a learning tool best used in small doses, said senior producer Marcia Grimsley

"We never recommend they use them as baby-sitters or expect a baby to sit down and watch an hour of TV," she said. "They're designed to be watched in five-, 10- or 15-minute increments, the same way you would with a book or a toy."

As for the American Academy of Pediatrics' recommendation that children avoid TV before age 2, she said Brainy Baby gets "hundreds" of unsolicited testimonials from parents saying their children are learning from the videos.

"If your child is going to be in front of television for any length of time, you need to put in front of something that is responsible parenting," Grimsley said. "We feel exposing children to these videos in small doses is more beneficial than detrimental."

Researchers say little, if any solid research supports the idea that these videos can benefit baby brains.

"I believe the consensus in the academic community is that there has not been research to indicate whether kids under 2 can learn from videos or computers," said Vickie Rideout, director of the Kaiser Family Foundation's Program for the Study of Entertainment Media and Health.

"The jury is still out," said Christakis, the Seattle pediatrician. "There's no evidence of benefit, and there's some concern for harm.

"Parents should think critically about why they're resorting to these things."

There's no question they're convenient, and for busy parents, it might provide a needed respite from baby, he said.

"But I don't think parents should put their child in front of them thinking they're making their children smarter," he said.

Tim Christie can be reached at 338-2572 or [e-mail].