The first time my daughter got sucked into screens for more than a few minutes, we were on a JetBlue flight coming home from vacation. She was about 3, I think, binge-watching cartoons.

Small issue: She didn’t like the way the headphones felt, so she cast them aside. And yet, she sat there blissfully watching Puppy Dog Pals if it were some kind of 1920s silent movie.

We sort of lucked into this no-screen-time mode of parenting. We didn’t even have an iPad at the time, and she was basically limited to the odd episode of Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood.

Ah, memories. Of course, then came Covid, and all bets were off.

I mention all this because of an interesting study showing that while parenting without screen time for kids these days is basically a Sisyphean endeavor, letting screens babysit comes with a cost. And the consequences might not show up for more than a decade.

New research from Singapore tracked 168 children for over 10 years and found that babies exposed to high levels of screen time before age two developed brain changes that led to slower decision-making and increased anxiety by their teenage years.

Writing in eBioMedicine, Dr. Huang Pei and his team at the National University of Singapore conducted brain scans at three different points — ages 4.5, 6, and 7.5 — to track how children’s brains developed over time.

Children with more infant screen time showed accelerated maturation in brain networks responsible for visual processing and cognitive control. That sounds like a good thing — faster development, right?

Wrong.

“Accelerated maturation happens when certain brain networks develop too fast, often in response to adversity or other stimuli,” Huang told researchers at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research in Singapore. “During normal development, brain networks gradually become more specialized over time. However, in children with high screen exposure, the networks controlling vision and cognition specialized faster, before they had developed the efficient connections needed for complex thinking.”

Building a house too quickly gives you a frame that goes up fast, but without a solid foundation. Years later, cracks appear.

The study found that screen time at ages three and four didn’t show these same effects. The critical window is infancy — specifically, before age two — when brain development is most rapid and vulnerable to environmental influences.

Children with these altered brain networks took longer to make decisions during cognitive tasks at age 8.5. By age 13, those with slower decision-making reported higher anxiety symptoms.

Unfortunately, the researchers estimate that globally, infants spend two to three hours daily on screens — far exceeding WHO recommendations.

But there’s an encouraging finding buried in the research.

In a related 2024 study published in Psychological Medicine, the same team found that parent-child reading could counteract some of these brain changes. Among children whose parents read to them frequently at age three, the link between infant screen time and altered brain development weakened significantly.

“It is not about this specific activity,” lead researcher Dr. Tan Ai Peng told The Straits Times. “Rather, it is about doing something together that engages the child.”

My daughter survived that silent viewing of Puppy Dog Pals on the plane just fine. And plenty of us surrendered to more screen time during the pandemic than we’d planned.

The message here isn’t about perfection.

Still, the choices we make for our kids before they’re two might seem small in the moment.

Those neural pathways being laid down? They’re building the foundation for how they’ll think, decide, and cope with stress for decades to come.

Nothing is more fascinating than the human brain and the unexpected ways our early experiences shape it.

Maybe screen time limits really are Sisyphean. But maybe we can agree, they’re worth the effort.