It’s nice to hear that older kids can learn things from TV. I certainly can, so why not them? I’ve been thinking about this more since the thread petered out, and one thing I think I’m going to try to maintain with Sam is not getting into a routine of watching TV every day just for something to do. I hope to do this by encouragement and by providing lots of good other things to do, instead of by making rules. We’ll see. It’s really, really hard to predict what concrete things you will do as a parent until the time comes.

This statement illustrates the wooziness inherent in all of these discussions. I think your statement is entirely true for, say, my 18-month old. He needs to see inductively the results of his actions in order to divine the reason behind them. But my older daughters (age 5) learn *a lot* from television. They’ve already acquired a decent causal foundation on which to understand the new causal connections.

For older children, I submit, television can be an excellent introduction to subject matter and a way to discover interests quickly. Proper delimiting of generalizations would be helpful to understand people’s points.

In the end, I think common sense is probably a better guide than a lot of these studies. Common sense includes the knowledge that kids can’t learn anything about cause and effect from TV (in the concrete way that they get from their own actions in the world), nor do they get any sensory input in the form of smell, taste, or touch. It also includes what we can deduce from introspection about our own experiences from TV. I trust all of that much more than any study I’ve seen thus far.