The lure of television is hard to resist for parents of boundlessly energetic toddlers. It's so tempting to buy a bit of free time by sitting them down in front of a show like Teletubbies. The PBS series has been highly publicized as "good" for one-year-olds. But we need to ask if the cost of toddlers watching TV may be too high.

Informal studies show that small children like Teletubbies, but we don't know whether any television programming can qualify as good for them. We don't know how watching television at this age may affect the enormous growth that babies experience from age one to two -- physically, mentally, and emotionally. And we don't know how it will affect their abilities in the future. There is no formal research currently available on babies and TV viewing, and some specialists even doubt that it can be done. We can only try to make our decisions based on what we know about how babies are developing at this age and what we know about how television affects older children.

We know that one-year-olds are crawling, cruising, and even starting to walk, with all the excitement and chaos those steps bring into our lives. We know that they are just beginning to use words, taking increasing joy in communicating with everyone in their lives. And we know that they're ever more actively exploring the world around them, with all of their abilities to taste, touch, see, smell, and hear.

Some of the problems with children watching television include:

TV viewing correlates with inactivity and obesity.
Many researchers have now demonstrated that children watching TV have much higher levels of obesity and much lower levels of physical activity. Are these tendencies ones we want to begin fostering at age one?

TV viewing can be addictive.
Studies show that the more television children watch, the more they want to watch. If addiction to watching television is a problem for older children, how much resistance can we expect one-year-olds to have?

TV viewing is passive entertainment.
Rather than fostering children's natural activity levels or creativity or interest in exploring their world, television encourages them to simply sit back and take in prefabricated images. This is exactly the opposite of what toddlers need for their development.

Even programming from as trustworthy a source as the Public Broadcasting System requires careful thought. When PBS brings us Teletubbies as a part of the "Ready to Learn" series, we might assume that this program will benefit one-year-olds. But in the absence of results from formal testing, parents must make their decisions based on the best information that is available. At the Media Center, we feel strongly that young children's television viewing should be postponed as long as possible and other activities provided and encouraged.