How to let your kid watch less TV?

There’s a lot of advice about how not to let your kids watch TV. But what’s the most important factor in helping young children to take in television responsibly?

Child development experts say that routinely plopping young children in front of the set when you’re feeling overwhelmed isn’t going to help their mental or physical health. But setting strict limits on kids’ screen time isn’t always effective either. And complete deprivation — removing sets from the family room and kids’ bedrooms — may not be a practical of limiting and controlling what youngsters watch.

What could help in teaching kids about how to watch not just the right amount, but also the best kind of television, is for parents to adopt responsible viewing habits themselves. According to a new study published in the journal Pediatrics, what’s most important in children’s viewing habits is how much TV (or DVDs or online entertainment) parents watch. The researchers interviewed 1550 parents with children 17 or younger about both their own and their children’s screen time, and when possible, they also asked the adolescents about how much television they watched.

The amount of TV the parents watched predicted the kids’ screen time, and this association was even stronger than that linked to parental restrictions on TV viewing, where the TVs were placed in the home, or how much television parents and children watched together.

On average, parents spent about four hours a day in front of a screen, and those who watched more media had kids who watched more. In fact, every hour that parents viewed TV was linked to nearly an additional half hour of screen time for their kids. There were some differences according to age, however. Restrictions on viewing had some effect for kids aged six to 11, and adolescents reported watching an hour more a day than their parents estimated.

This is especially important when it comes to screen time, since kids will not only imitate the quantity of parents’ viewing habits but the quality, say parenting experts. If you are using your screen time in unhealthy ways, your kids will pick up on that and follow suit.

Toddler tech: How young is too young for a smartphone?

(CBS News) Everyone has a smartphone these days, even toddlers. New research says 25 percent of kids 2 years old and younger have their own smartphones, which parents say is used as a learning tool for their kids.

However, experts say that this is way too young for children to be utilizing this type of technology and that the kids are not learning but are just being given the phone as a distraction. It is the same as putting a child in front of a television.

"A toddler should be rolling around, touching things, developing their brains and not checking out the latest YouTube video," said CBS News contributor Lee Woodruff 

One major reason why experts are concerned is that this type of smartphone use, at such a young age, can impede early development in areas that would impact the child for the rest of their lives.

Since childhood is a time for serious brain development, children could face problems with their basic social, verbal and learning skills.

Psychiatrist Gail Saltz told the "CBS This Morning: Saturday" co-hosts that this type of smartphone use could actually hurt the child and that "this is really for babysitting purposes or the fear that your child can't be bored."

"These years are the years that you need to be developing vocabulary, which means speaking and listening, so if you're engaged in a gadget, you're really minimizing that," she said. "We've seen all kinds of data now on play and how important it is to, frankly, be bored and be stimulated to do imaginative play, what that does for building creativity."

She also said that one thing that most parents do not realize is that a smartphone is "structured time" and does not allow for free thinking.