Understanding Kids 6: Screen Media and the Developing Brain

Posted on: Monday 13 July 2026 9:01pm by Simon Bor

Takeaways

• The pace of children’s content is much faster than it was twenty years ago.
• Adults build their understanding on prior knowledge, but young children don’t have prior knowledge.
• A toddler’s brain takes 10 times as long to process content than an adult, so the pace must be slow.

Professor Sam Wass of the University of East London (Institute for the Science of Early Years), shared new research that shows that the content children are watching is getting faster paced and denser, illustrated by a slide that showed the difference in pace of the CBeebies show ‘In the Night Garden’ from 2006, and a typical YouTube Kids mix from 2026. ‘Not all screen time is equal,’ he said. ‘Some screen time is good for developing brains.’

Sam took us back to basics. He discussed how our attention is automatically attracted by movement. In pre-history, say 10,000 years ago, we needed to be vigilant in case something might want to eat us. The part of the brain that is activated by movement is one of the earliest to be developed (located at the top of the neck), whereas we use the part of the brain at the top of our foreheads to predict. Our brains are prediction machines, and we anticipate what people are going to say in a conversation, or the taste of a carrot before biting on it. Moment by moment the brain is guessing.

As adults, we find a complicated concept told to us in another language hard or impossible to follow. This is because we build on things we already know about using prior knowledge. However, children, especially young ones, don’t have much prior knowledge. That’s why, for example, the repeated 2-minute video in ‘Teletubbies’ works for its intended audience. Adults might find it boring to watch it a second time, as they are already familiar with the type of content and setting, but it’s not designed for their brains. By contrast, the young child gets more out of its second viewing as he/she now has prior knowledge about the content.

This changes as the child gets older and they begin to seek out ‘violations of expectations’. They look for something that builds on their knowledge before the unexpected happens. This is the way ‘In The Night Garden’ is constructed, which works for younger children. Sam compared the way faces, movement, and cutting are used in an adult series, like ‘Holby City’ to the longer shots and slower editing of the CBeebies programme, which is due to the fact that a 2-year-old’s brain takes 10 times longer to process information.