Plausibility is not yet a fact.
Hardly any other question is so tempting to overlook this epistemological truism as whether and to what extent television is detrimental to early childhood development.
Between 1997 and 2014, the time children between the ages of birth and two spent in front of screens doubled.
In 2009, a child was on average four months old when it first watched television.
Can it still be reassuring that the first generation that grew up with the remote control will soon be retiring without the Occident going under?
However, an empirically based blanket judgment is more difficult than ever - especially since 2010, when the first iPad came onto the market and a screen is not necessarily just a telly today, but can also be an interactive toy.
Psychologists led by Bahia Guellai from the Université Paris Nanterre have now attempted in "Frontiers in Psychology" to review the study situation on the subject and evaluated 478 specialist articles from the years 2000 to 2020.
They actually come to the conclusion that the time in front of the screen is not only not harmful for the cognitive development of young children, but can even be beneficial.
Now before a load falls from the hearts of all those parents who have put their little ones in front of the screen more often than usual in the past two years so that there is peace in the home office: That's not how it works.
In addition to the no-brainer that, if at all, only age-appropriate content gets toddlers on the screen, everything indicates that positive effects occur there (and only then)
when the parents watch or play along.
So if your offspring isn't Harry Potter-age yet, you might prefer to read something to the little ones than do the Teletubbies.