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Talking Toddlers
The Most Overlooked Disruptor in Your Child’s Development (It’s in Almost Every Home) Ep 145
01:08:47
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Now, technically, I can't say screens cause adhd. The science hasn't crossed that formal threshold. So technically, I would not say that. However, I've spent nearly four decades watching being in the thick of it with children every day. And I want to say something that I think gets lost in the space between the research papers and real life. When the background noise is always on, when our attention is always divided, and when quiet is treated like something we have to fill in. Hello, and welcome to Talking Toddlers, where I share more than just tips and tricks on how to reduce tantrums or build your toddler's vocabulary. Here, our goal is to develop clarity, because in this modern world, it's truly overwhelming. This podcast is about empowering moms to know the difference between fact and fiction, to never give up, and to tap into everyday activities so your child stays on track. He's not falling behind, he's thriving. Through your guidance, we know that true learning starts at home. So let's get started. Are we really surprised that there's been a spike in children's ability to focus and regulate and follow through? Are we really surprised? I want you to do something right now. Just pause for a second and listen to the room that you're in. Is something playing in the background? A show? The news? Music? A podcast from earlier that nobody turned off? Is something streaming on the tablet, perhaps in the room next door? If the answer is yes, you're not alone. In fact, you're in the majority. Research tells us that in the homes of young children, background TV is on an average four to six hours a day. Not four to six hours in which your child is sitting and watching, but the TV is on, running, just running. And here's what I want to spend time on today. Nobody's concerned about it because nobody's watching it. The baby is in the corner on the floor, playing. Perhaps you're folding laundry or answering emails. Your toddler is stacking blocks. The screen is just there in the background doing nothing. Except it isn't doing nothing. After nearly four decades of clinical work with children and families, I want to tell you what the research and my own experience actually says that's happening in that room. Because once you understand it, I mean truly understand it, you won't be able to unhear it. And I mean that in the best possible way. So let me be very clear about what we're going to talk about today, because I want to make sure that you don't file this under screen time. This is not about your child sitting down to Watch a show with or without you. That's a different conversation for a different day. This is about ambient background TV background noise. The screen that's just on while life happens around it. The TV in the living room while you make lunch. The show that's been running since the morning and nobody's actually watching it anymore. The background hum that has become so normal in most homes that we genuinely don't even notice it's there. That's what I'm talking about. And it turns out that that background, that passive, unattended, nobody's really watching noise, is one of the most underestimated disruptors in early development that I have ever come across. Not because of what it's showing, but because of what it's interrupting. I want to be honest with you about something before we go any further on this topic. This topic is actually personally hard for me to talk about. Not because I struggle with it in my own home, but because my husband and I have never been TV people, genuinely. Once we were out of the college phase, TV simply wasn't on unless we were purposely sitting down to watch a show, most likely together. It just wasn't part of our rhythm. It never has. It never became our default. Which means I've spent nearly four decades watching this from the outside. And I can tell you, watching it from the outside, especially in homes of people I truly, truly love and care about, it's its own. Kind of hard because I've sat in my sister's living room, my best friend's living room. I've watched their kids. I've seen exactly what I'm going to share with you today playing out in real time in families that I love and care about deeply. I tried gently to share what I know, and I watched it not land, not even register. They couldn't wrap their minds around it because this is just how everybody lives, right? It's like the air that we breathe or the water that we drink. No one really questions it. It's just life. And that's exactly why I want to talk about it here. Not to make you feel bad, but because you came here looking for clear ways to navigate this modern world. And I would be doing you a disserv if I stayed quiet about something this significant. So before I walk you through the research, I want to come back to something I said last week. Because it's the foundation everything else rests on. God designed the developing brain to wire through relationship through the back and forth of two people in the same space, paying attention to each other. A child makes A sound. A parent responds. A toddler points to something. A parent follows their gaze and then names it. A baby reaches, perhaps fusses, and then settles. And a parent reads all of that in real time. That's not just sweet, that's neurology. That is literally how language and self regulation and, and connection build inside your child's developing brain. The technical term is now referred to as serve and return. Like in the game tennis. Your child serves. Perhaps it's a sound, a gesture, a look, and you, the parent returns it. Each exchange is a rep. And those reps, repeated hundreds of times a day, are what wires your child's brain for language, for emotional regulation, for capacity to connect with the world around him. Now, what happens when there's constant noise in the background? The rep gets interrupted, the serves get missed. The returns don't come not because anyone meant to, but because the noise is pulling attention in too many directions all at once. And a brain that isn't getting its reps in is a brain that's quietly falling behind the pace that it was designed to keep. So today I want to cover five things that the research tells us, and it's actually what we know to be true. And I want to be clear. Every one of these findings is specifically about background tv, not your child watching it, just the TV running in the room while real life is happening. So the first one that research has taught us is a thing called the word gap. When background TV is on, the number of words your young child hears drops dramatically. We're talking about a drop from roughly a thousand words per hour. Without the TV, it drops all the way down to 250 words per hour. That's a reduction of nearly 70% in just the words heard in a single hour. So in a landmark study in 2024, they analyzed over 40,000 hours of recordings across 43 different languages. And they found that the single greatest predictor of how much a baby vocalizes is how much the adult speech is around them. Not income, not education, not gender, but simply how much adult speech is around them in everyday life. Just talk. So what that means is that every hour, background noise is on. It displaces real adult conversation. It isn't just about the noise. It's crowding out one of the things that your baby and your toddler's young developing brain is most hungry for. So if we multiply that across a day, across a week, across those first three years of life, when the brain is building its entire language foundation, the words simply aren't happening because of the noise in the background. And the research is clear about why. So we adults talk less when there's noise in the background, when it's present, because it interferes with our verbal communication. The noise doesn't just fill the room. It actually pulls us out of the conversational instinct we didn't even know we had most of the time. So we have to really understand how the first is just the exposure of the words that your child hears or doesn't hear because we are disrupted. So the second one of these five research data points is the quality of language drops as well, not just the quantity. Right before, we went from 1,000 words to 250 words per hour. Now we have to look at the research that says, wow, the quality of the words we use and the language we use differs as well. And honestly, this one is where I want to bring in some research that truly shaped how I think about language and language growth and development for decades. Right. Because this was under a major study that was in the middle of my clinical practice. And it goes to the heart of what background TV is doing that most people, whether you're the parent or the researcher or the therapist or the teacher, we've never even considered before. So let's step back. Back in the 1990s, researchers Betty Hart and Todd Risley published what became really one of the most cited and often debated studies in early child development. They actually followed families across different socioeconomic backgrounds and found significant differences in not just how many words children heard, because this study was called the 30 million word gap, but they also delved into what kinds of words the child heard. So their work actually sparked a national conversation about what they called that 30 million word gap. And while their study has been nuanced and debated, like I said, in the decades that follow, and we still will find articles debating it, but the exact numbers have been questioned. The discrepancy of socioeconomic framing has been challenged, but the one consistent finding that's held up across decades is the quality of language. What that means is that the quality and the type of language directed at your child matters enormously. And so it's not just the number of words, but what those words mean and represent. So Hart and Reisley observed something that I've watched play out in my clinical practice. And across the families, regardless of income, education, and background, there was a meaningful difference between language that was directive and prohibitive versus language that's expansive and conversational and language that said things like, no, stop, sit down, don't touch that, versus language that said oh, look at that. What do you think? Let me show you. Tell me more. So when we compare both, they're both talking to and at your child, but one is building and the other isn't. The research is clear that the language that builds your child's brain most powerfully isn't the language that instructs or corrects or even directs. It's the language that follows that comments. It's the language that notices what your child is looking at and then names it. It's the language that responds to her babbling as if it was real conversation. It's also the language that takes what she just did. Perhaps she reached for a cup or pointed to the dog or made a Google sound. And then you build upon it. That quality makes a difference. It's that kind of language rooted in the shared moment, the real back and forth. That's what the developing brain is most hungry for. And here's exactly where background TV enters this conversation. Again, it isn't just that fewer words are spoken when the TV is on. That's just a given now. But the words that are spoken actually become simpler. They're more directive, more transactional, and less conversational. Come here. Stop. No. Here you go. That parent vocabulary is narrow. The sentences are shorter. The expansive back and forth. Follow your child's lead. Conversation that we just talked about, that kind that actually builds the neural architecture. That kind gets squeezed out not just in quantity, not just in the number count, but in the quality as well. So it's not just that your child isn't hearing the number of words. She's actually hearing a thinner or flatter version of language that she needs the most to build her vocabulary, to build her sentence structure. The richness is gone. The nuance is gone. That conversational dance that wires her brain for complexity, for comprehension, for the capacity to eventually read and reason and connect that language. That quality is being quietly replaced by the noise of the screen that nobody is even watching. So your child's language competency in kindergarten predicts her language, her math, her reading, her social abilities later on in fifth grade. That is the best indicator for overall success. What are her speech and language skills in kindergarten? And then we could look at 5th grade and 8th grade and 12th grade. But the truth is, it starts here, in these ordinary moments, in the quality of what she hears before she even begins to talk readily herself or himself. The background TV is making those moments thinner every single day. The research is clear, and nobody's talking about it. So the third point of what research is telling Us is that play becomes shallow. So I want you to imagine that we could watch a nine month old who has just learned to crawl, they're just learning how to use all four at the same time and move across the room. Picture him sitting there in his little tripod position and he sees a rattle across the room. Something in his brain lights up and he's like, huh? And he builds his intention, he, he creates a desire and then builds a plan. He begins to shift his weight in that sitting position and get to all fours, right? And he gets his leg out from underneath him. He coordinates his arms and his leg and he starts moving across the floor. He's reaching for that rattle, he gets there, he picks it up. He actually can balance on those three limbs, right? And then he works his way back up into that sitting position. You've probably seen it, to you, that might look sweet is actually precious, right? And even the first several times you saw it in those beginning stages, you're like, wow, look at him go. That's free freedom. And then life gets busy, it moves on and we stop really seeing it or noticing it. But I've spent decades watching babies play in simple environments with just three or four little toys, nothing more. Just their body in this three dimensional space with a few objects, or perhaps they're just, you know, a box of tissues. And I want to tell you what I actually see when I watch that moment. I see a full body neurological event. There's motor planning, bilateral coordination, core strength, visual tracking, cause and effect, object permanence, spatial awareness, problem solving. All of it is happening simultaneously in a nine month old who wants to get to the rattle. And he's learning his new motor skills in three dimensional space. And if you watch that same baby over several weeks, something remarkable unfolds. His movement becomes more fluid, automatic. The transitions are smoother and his navigation runs longer. The focus is deeper. He can get to items way across the room. That confidence is quieter and more sure. He doesn't look to you quite so often. He knows how to move his body in space and master that desire. What looked like baby playing is actually a brain building its own architecture, rep by rep in real time. And the learning that's happening in those moments in that simple room with simple toys and you are just nearby, is among the most sophisticated neurological work a human being will ever do, simply because the brain is starting from nothing and building everything. These moments are not small. I need you to hear that really clearly. These moments are not just sweet little baby things that adults eventually stop noticing. Because nothing dramatic seems to be happening. I look at that as something profound every single time. We, the adults, have just lost the ability to see it or notice it. And that loss, parents not seeing it, not protecting it, not understanding what they're witnessing, that weighs heavy on me. And honestly, it has weighed heavy on me for years. Because the faster our modern world has gotten, the less we see in those critical three years. And what I've observed in hundreds of babies and toddlers studying their play up close, watching the neurons connect and learning unfold, connecting how we develop between the child and his or her world, to me, that's irreplaceable. That is work. That is the work. And it requires one thing above almost everything else. It requires an uninterrupted space to happen in. Now, here is what background TV does to that same moment. Even when your toddler isn't watching, even when his or her back is to the screen and he seems completely absorbed, the background disrupts the depth of his ability to play. And play is just learning in the moment, whether it's for that rattle or that Kleenex box, or he's trying to pull the sock off of his foot. Instead of settling into one thing, exploring it, turning it over, figuring it out, coming back to it, failing and trying again. His mind drifts. He picks up something, puts it down, moves on to the next thing, never really landing anywhere. What looks like to the average observer. Exploration is really what research has taught us. Fragmented attention. The audio and visual interruptions in the background are pulling at his nervous system even when his eyes aren't on the screen. The deep play, the kind I just described with that nine month old, requires sustained attention. And the background is quietly stealing that from him. It's a disruptor. It's not dramatic, it's not all at once, but it's just enough repeated across enough hours, across the days, across the weeks to actually change what his play builds and grows into. And once you've seen what deep, uninterrupted play actually looks like, actually how it blossoms, you can't unsee it and you can't stay quiet about it. That's where I'm at. I want to share the importance of this so you can make a decision. So the fourth piece of research that really comes up to the forefront is around executive function and how much of a hard hit that takes. So let me start somewhere that stunned me the first time I saw this data. And the truth is I keep looking at it and it keeps stunning me because Nobody's talking about it Back in 2009, researchers published the first large scale study in over 20 years examining screen use inside child care settings. They actually looked at 168 child care programs across four states. And what they found was that children in home based child care programs were being exposed on an average of 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 hours of background TV every single day. Every day in these settings. The lead researcher called it alarming. He said children in the United States were watching essentially twice as much television as anyone had previously thought. And that was before we fully understood what background TV was actually doing. This is what makes this finding even harder to sit with. That study, like I just said, was published in 2009, 17 years ago, and to my knowledge no one has had the courage to try to replicate it at scale. A systematic review of screen use in childcare described the entire body of research on this topic as being in its infancy back in 2009. Meaning that we have barely scratched the surface of understanding what is happening inside the places where millions of young children spend the majority of their waking hours. Now, you know, as I sit here, I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions about why no one has gone back to look more carefully. I have my own impressions. But let's get back to what the science does tell us. Clearly. Research using nationally representative data found that background TV exposure during sleep predicted poor executive function in children. Not just waking hours when the TV was on and they were playing in the room or close to it, but during sleep, the nervous system is still registering what's in the environment. And even when your child is unconscious, executive function, that's the brain's ability to focus that frontal lobe. That's the ability to manage impulses, to learn how to wait, to hold information in short term memory while they plan their next move. Executive function helps us be able to shift attention. If I'm playing and I hear somebody walk in the room, can I shift my attention and look and then shift back? Executive function allows us to follow through and execute our plan right? How do I get that rattle from across the room? It is one of the strongest predictors we have of school readiness, how to build healthy relationships and long term well being. We study executive functions. We know that is just beginning to develop in those early years and that it takes 25 to 30 years to come to full fruition. But the foundation is laid now at 1 and 2 and 3 and 5 and 6. So this brings me to something I want to say clearly because it sits at the intersection of what the research shows and what I've observed clinically in my own practice for nearly four decades. ADHD diagnoses, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. ADHD diagnoses in children have risen significantly over the last several decades. Medication, those rates have followed. And the research is now beginning to ask a question that I think deserves a direct answer. In 2023, just a couple of years ago, meta analysis of over 81,000 children found that those getting more than two hours of daily screen time showed over 50% higher odds of meeting the criteria for ADHD compared to children with less than two hours. And then in another study using genetic analysis specifically designed to test causation rather than just association, they found increased ADHD risk linked to TV viewing, with no evidence that the reverse was true. What that means is that it wasn't that the children with ADHD were simply drawn to more screens. The viewing appeared to be contributing to the outcome. And then in another study at the University of Alberta, it found that by the age of five, children spending two or more hours per day on screens were nearly eight times more likely to meet the criteria for ADHD compared to children spending 30 minutes or less. After all of my years in clinical work, watching these patterns unfold in real time with real children and real families and real school systems, I've seen too many times that we just can't dismiss. The most rigorous studies are beginning to finally catch up to what clinicians like me have been watching quietly up close for years now. Technically, I can't say screens cause adhd. The science hasn't crossed that formal threshold. So technically I would not say that. However, I've spent nearly four decades, like I keep saying, watching, being in the thick of it with children every day. And I want to say something that I think gets lost in the space between the research papers and real life. It's not that complicated to connect these dots. When we surround ourselves and the most neurologically sensitive years in your child's life with constant fragmented stimulation, when the background noise is always on, when our attention is always divided on a subconscious level, and when quiet is treated like something we have to fill in, are we really surprised that there's been a spike in children's ability to focus and regulate and follow through? Are we really surprised and confused? To me, that's not a mystery. That's a pattern. And patterns have causes. And I think we owe it to all of our children to say that out loud. To be honest, what is happening to make these numbers skyrocket? The truth is executive function doesn't struggle in a vacuum. It struggles in an environment that never gives it the quiet, the white space, the opportunity that it needs to grow and flourish and blossom. Now, the fifth research that I have to highlight is around the concept of sensory processing and how background TV noise is affecting that part of development. And the truth is, I need to spend a little more time here, because I also believe that it's one that is the most misunderstood areas of all of childhood development. So let me start with giving you some histories, because I think context matters enormously. Let's step back for just a moment. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, a remarkable researcher and occupational therapist named Jean Ayres. She was at the University of Southern California, which is where I trained, and then later built my practice there in Los Angeles. But she began asking questions nobody else was asking. She was working with a very specific subgroup of children, Children with cerebral palsy, children with significant learning disabilities, and children with Franklin neurological deficits. She wanted to understand the relationship between their brains and their behavior and to improve their quality of life. That was her focus. By the time I entered the scene, her work was being discussed and debated. But her initial focus was looking at a targeted, specific, carefully bounded clinical population. And at the time, her work was groundbreaking. But it was also met with enormous resistance, because, as we know as human beings, change is not easy. But the resistance around her work was partly because the neuroscience needed to fully support it wasn't there yet. The concept of neuroplasticity, which is the brain's capacity to change and reorganize itself throughout our lifespan, was barely emerging at that time when she was really coming to the forefront in her work. I later on had the privilege of studying under Dr. Michael Merznik, one of the pioneers of neuroplasticity research. And he, during his early career, he faced his own version of resistance in the academic circles at that time, in the 70s and 80s, right? So he was a little bit older or. Or later on than Dr. Ayers. But using the word plasticity in any of his paper risked being rejected outright. And he shared these stories with us that he had to find a way to get in through the back door. The idea that brains could change was not yet accepted science, which meant that the idea that Dr. Ayers had that she could change a child's sensory processing system was essentially unfathomable to the mainstream. So Dr. Ayers was working against two walls simultaneously, right? The medical establishment that didn't accept her framework and a neuroscience field that hadn't yet Caught up with what she was observing with children clinically. So back when I started after Dean Eyre's work, and as Dr. Michael Merznik was coming to the forefront in our studies, I was actually asked to leave a number of IEP meetings in the early 1990s. If I brought up sensory integration or sensory processing problems that any child was presenting with, I was actually asked to leave the meeting. And I was asked by the people who were responsible for helping a child who was struggling in their classroom. Right. I was the outsider. I was hired by the families as an outside diagnostician or a consultant. So to bring more light to this discussion. And I tell you that not to relitigate old battles. I tell you that because I want you to understand something important that Dr. Ayers work, she developed that framework for a specific, identifiable subgroup of children with significant neurological challenges. Cerebral palsy. Right. Neurological deficits. Her work was never intended to describe the general population. So when you look at her work in the 50s and 60s, and then when I entered the scene in the early 1990s, that was looking at the general population. What we started to see in our clinical practices was what she identified across the board with everyday kids. Sensory processing difficulties in the 50s and 60s were an anomaly, a distinct clinical picture inside a distinct clinical group. But we started to see it expand. So I want you to sit with that when I continue this conversation. Right now, look at it this way. I have a lot of grandmothers. I have a lot of professional people listening to these podcast episodes. So if you went to school in the 1960s, 70s, and even through the 80s, I want you to think back to your classroom. Your classmates. Were half of those children unable to tolerate noise? Were they overwhelmed in grocery stores? Did they melt down over the tags in their clothes? Or unable to sustain attention for more than, you know, a fleeting minute or two? Did they constantly seek movement just to feel regulated in their own body? Did they need special chairs and fidget toys? Were any of your siblings or your cousins or your neighbors, did any of those children present this way? No, they weren't. And here is the question nobody really wants to ask or discuss. Not in our medical or educational system. They don't like going here. If sensory processing difficulties were always this common and we just lacked the language or the understanding, where are those adults now? They'd be in their 50s and 60s and 70s. They would have moved throughout my workforce, my professional life. They weren't there because this is not a population that we missed or overlooked or didn't get. This is a Population that grew, something changed, the environment changed, and then children responded. What began as a clinical framework for specific neurological subgroup has been stretched to describe an expanding portion of the entire generation of children. And instead of asking why, instead of treating that expansion as the urgent signal it actually is, what have we done? We've normalized it. We have actually built industries around it. Sensory diets, sensory rooms, sensory toys, sensory, sensory bins, sensory everything. But hear this common is not the same as normal, and normal is not the same as optimal. And I will say this clearly because it. I believe it deeply. This is not God's design. He did not design children to struggle just to get through their day. He didn't design children to be overwhelmed by the sound of the vacuum cleaner, or to fall apart in the grocery store, or to be so dysregulated by ordinary sensory input that learning and connecting and simply being in the world feels like too much. That's not a personality type, and it's not a learning type either. That is a nervous system telling us, all of us, something about its environment. And here is where the research and my clinical experience converge in a way I can no longer keep quiet or whisper to the handful of colleagues that see it like I see it. Studies have found associations between early and consistent background screen exposure and atypical sensory processing in toddlers, which means sensory sensitivities always seeking sensation, rough and tumble, play pushing hard, picking, biting, as well as sensory avoiding. I can't go there. It hurts my ears, hurts my body. The nervous system that seems to have its volume turned up too high, maybe in part be responding to the environment that has had its volume turned up too high for too long. It's a cause and effect. But there's another layer to this that concerns me even more than this research. And I need to share it with you here as well. We have normalized sensory processing difficulties, and we have normalized attention challenges. And now, quietly, steadily, we are normalizing something else. In 1970, autism was diagnosed in approximately 1 in 10,000 children. It was rare. I didn't even study it in graduate school. Today, the CDC puts that number at 1 in 31 nationally. However, in California, which tracks developmental data through one of the most rigorous systems in the country. It's called the Regional Center Network. I'm well aware of it for all my years in Los Angeles. But their data states that autism is 1 in 22 children. Now, California has consistently run ahead of the national trends, which means that the rest of the country is just a couple years behind. It does not mean that California is an outlier. It just means that their data is so robust and so accurate that our data needs to adjust. Now, that is not a small shift in diagnostic criteria, because I hear that argument a lot. We just got better at diagnosing. Nope. And that is not simply better awareness. We just all of a sudden noticed these kids. We disregarded them before. No. That is a staggering generational change in the neurological health of our children. And we are simply not asking loudly enough or often enough why. And the truth is, I am not here to give you a simple answer to a complex question. It requires a lot of conversation. I am here to say this. We have a pattern or a habit of rushing toward labels before we've actually done the harder work at asking and answering what is driving these symptoms. A child who is sensitive and easily overwhelmed, constantly seeking input, struggling to focus, limited words, poor sleep, picky eating. Before anyone asks a single environmental question, before anyone has dug into the why, someone in a position of authority now looks at him and say, ah, he's autistic. Now, don't get me wrong. I understand why it happens. The diagnostic criteria around both of these, autism and sensory processing. I know the criteria is broad and a little fluid, and there is this human pressure to name things. I think I know that that's real. And yes, sensory processing difficulties and autism can and do overlap. Often. That relationship is real. I've seen it, I've treated it, I understand it. But environmentally induced sensory dysregulation looks a lot like autism in some children. It may express itself and fit the whole criteria of autism, but there are now hundreds and hundreds of cases where we've been able to reverse that. These are not clean, separate categories. And that deserves its own careful, honest conversation, which I intend to have over and over again. But what I have witnessed across all of these years, when we rush to label, we stop looking for the root and the root matters. Because if we can identify what is driving the dysregulation, the symptoms, we can look at the environment, the nutrition, sensory overload, and the undiagnosed, whatever. Microbiome, hearing loss, all kinds of undiagnosed things, we have the opportunity to actually change the trajectory of the future of your children. Researchers like Dr. James Adams has actually suggested that over 50% of cases may be preventable or significantly improved by addressing the environmental and biological contributors. 50%. That is not a small number. That is an enormous amount of hope sitting inside a very uncomfortable question that most people aren't willing to ask. I'm Very willing to ask it, discuss it, dig deep. And the truth is, I believe you're willing to ask it, too, otherwise you wouldn't be here. The labels can wait, but your children, they can't. And I do want to say this with the utmost respect. Do not let any single opinion, professional opinion, including your pediatricians, be the last word on your child ever. A second opinion is not disloyalty. It is not paranoia. It is the most responsible thing you can do. Pediatricians are doing important work. I give them that. But developmental nuance is not the center of their training. It's barely under their wheelhouse. So please, find someone who will keep asking why. Find someone who will not stop at the symptoms. Because your child's behavior is always communicating something to you. And the first question should always be, hmm, what is his nervous system trying to tell us? And what, in this environment, might be contributing to it? Background noise is one answer to that question. It's not the only one, but it is one within your power to change. Starting today in your own home, before anyone puts your child in a box and stops looking underneath, look at your environment. What can you do? What can you change to make it better and richer and easier? Now, I do want to talk about the adult piece to all of this, to the tv background noise, right? And I saved this one for its own moment because I think it's the most important piece of all if we really think about this. And yet it really is the least one that we talk about, especially in the research, right? When the TV is on in the background, it isn't just affecting your toddler. It's affecting us, the adults, too. Background noise pulls the adult attention in ways that we dramatically underestimate. We think we're present, we're in the room. We might even take our phone and put it on the shelf. We're physically there. But what is it doing neurologically? The part of our brain that tracks novelty, that registers new sounds and movements and changing images and all kinds of different auditory input that is being continuously recruited by what's happening in the background on that screen, even when we're now watching it, even when we couldn't even tell you what was on the screen or what's been playing. And what that means is that the quality of attention we're able to give our kids, right, the real, sustained, attuned presence that we're all striving for, and that's what their nervous system is really looking for, that's quietly diminished when we have the TV on the background. That Serve and return that I mentioned earlier. It requires you as the parent, to actually be available to notice when a serve happens. A parent whose attention isn't being fractured by the screen in the background can notice. I'm not saying that you have to be perfectly present every moment of every day, right? I've never said that nobody is and nobody should be. But what I am saying, the research is really, really strong and fairly consistent that the background TV is making the ordinary moments of presence, the ones that happen naturally when the room is quiet. Those ordinary moments are much harder to access for both of you, your child or children, and you. So this is what it looks like in real life. Let me put all of this in a picture for you. Say it's ten o' clock in the morning. Your toddler is on the floor with her blocks or her dolls or her trucks. You're nearby. You're having a cup of coffee, half watching the news that's been on there since breakfast, but it's still running in the background. She holds up a red block and looks at you in a quiet room. You catch that? You say, ah, red block. You've got the red block. And she looks at the block again. She looks back at you. And then she reaches for another one. The exchange happens. The rep is logged neurologically in that moment. But with background noise pulling at your attention, that moment has a much higher chance of slipping by. She could hold up the block, but you didn't quite catch it. And she waited for heartbeat, but then put it down and moved on. The serve went unreturned. Now, that's just one moment, unremarkable on its own, of course, but that's happening dozens of times, probably hundreds of times during the day in the homes where the background noise is constant. And over weeks and months, cumulatively, over the three most critical years of brain development, those missed moments accumulate into something much larger than any single exchange. This is not about guilt. I want to say that clearly. This is just about awareness and learning how to navigate this complex modern world that we all have created. This is about cause and effect. You cannot return a serve you didn't see or you didn't notice. And the background noise is making you miss more than you realize. And most people are unaware. So here's what I want to ask you to try this week and is genuinely small. I want you to pick one window of your day, just one, and turn everything off. Not for the whole day, not forever, just one window. Maybe it's an hour after your toddler wakes up in the morning. Maybe it's at lunchtime, maybe it's an hour right before a nap. There's no tv, no show running in the background, no podcast playing while you move through your room and do your activities together and separately. Just the sounds of your home, your voice, her voice, his voice. The blocks hitting the ground, your footsteps, maybe the dog walking on your tile floor, the spoon in the bowl, the ordinary sounds, doorbell. All of those real life just being lived together. And then notice what happens. Does she play differently? Does he stay with something longer? Does he bring you more things? Does she babble more or make more eye contact? Does he seem more settled? And how about you? Does something shift in you? Are you feeling a little more settled? You don't have to commit to anything. You don't have to overhaul your home. Just notice what one quiet window feels like for her or him and you. Because the data is clear. And so is the experience of almost every family I've ever worked with that have tried this. Quiet is not empty. Quiet is where the connection lives. And I do want to address a question that I'm sure is running in your mind right now, because I get this question a lot. Before we wrap this up, I want to address this because the question is always, what about music? And I think it's a very fair question. And there's research on that as well. And as I said, I get it often. And just like a lot of things in childhood, the answer is nuanced. And it's nuanced enough that it deserves a direct response rather than just letting you wander or glazing over it. But soft lyric free instrumental music is genuinely a different animal than the background TV noise. So I want you to make that clear. Lyric free music, instrumental music is very, very different than the background tv. Research and my clinical experience both support this. And I've talked, like I said, hundreds of families over the years. Unlike television, which delivers fragmented, high intensity speech based stimuli that directly competes with the language that your child is trying to process, trying to learn code and master, that background TV speech really competes upfront with it. But soft instrumental music does not carry the same information or cognitive load. It doesn't mask speech the way TV does. It doesn't fragment our attention in the same way either. In the right conditions, it can actually support a calm, focused, regulated environment. And there's studies around that. But and this matters. There are real conditions attached to all of this. Lyrics change everything. Vocals are processed in the same pathways that your child uses to process your voice and build his or her language. So the words in the music and the lyrics compete with that. The moment that music has words, it begins to compete in ways that pure instrumental music does not. So if music is in your home, instrumental is always the better choice during these early years. Also, please note that volume matters more than most people realize. What feels like gentle background to you may be registering very differently to a nervous system that's still learning to filter and prioritize sound. Their auditory system is highly immature. So keep it genuinely low. Quiet enough that your voice is always the dominant sound in the room. And even soft music should not be constant. Any sound that never stops becomes a layer that our nervous system has to work around. We don't want them to have to work so hard. Periods of real quiet, true silence, or near silence are not empty. They're when the brain consolidates, processes, thinks, integrates. What have I been doing during this time, during this period? And how can I consolidate that? Your child needs those quiet windows every day. So the short answer regarding music. Soft instrumental music at a low volume, in moderation. I know that's a slippery word, but is not the concern that background TV is right, but it is not a free pass either. The goal is always a home where your voice and your children's voices are are the primary sounds. Everything else is a guest, not a resident. So here's what I want you to carry with you today. Background noise is not a neutral presence in your home. Never has been, never will be. It's an active one. It is quietly narrowing the words your child hears, thinning the quality of language around them. Right? Dropping the quality, fragmenting her play doesn't get into that deep play. And pulling your attention away from the moments she needs you to catch so you can have that serve in return. Not because anyone meant for this to happen. We didn't know everything seems to be a slippery slope, but because it's just on. Because it's become. Most homes default. Because silence can feel strange when we're not used to it. I get takes practice getting used to it. But silence isn't what we're after. We're after the sound of your voice and her voice. The noises of everyday life in a healthy, clean, unadulterated environment. The back and forth of two people who are actually paying attention to each other. That is what her developing brain or his developing brain is listening for. So turn the volume down and watch what comes up in its place. Connection, rhythm, more words, deeper play. Next week we're going to stay in the territory of the home environment. But we're going to shift from sounds to something that you might not expect. I've talked about it in past episodes, but I really want to bring it home. No pun intended, to you. We're going to talk about food. Specifically what ultra processed food is doing to the developing brain and your child's nervous system. And why what your toddler eats is far more connected to how she feels, regulated or dysregulated, focuses or not. Communication is also built and developed based on the nutrients that we take and feed ourselves, our brain, our body and, and all of that. So it's one of the most eye opening conversations I have with parents still to this day. Every day I talk about what is your child eating and I can't wait for you and me to get into it next week. But before I let you go, I want to say something directly. If you've been listening and finding yourself mentally walking through your home, thinking about things, looking at your day and your routine, looking at your own child and wondering what you might be missing, that awareness matters. Those questions matter. I don't want you just to let it sit there. My discovery calls exist for exactly this moment. They serve two purposes and I want to be really clear of what both of those are. The first is simple. I generally want to hear from you. I want to hear in your own words what's hard, what's confusing, what is something that you wish someone would just give you. A clear, straightforward answer. Because after 40 years of clinical work, staying close to what you real moms are actually living is how I can create things that truly serve you, that I'm not guessing or assuming anything. And the second reason for the discovery calls is if it feels like a good fit, there is an opportunity to work with me directly through my one to one coaching program. There's no pressure, no pitch. It's just a conversation. And if you've been thinking, I think I need something more than just a podcast, that door is open. Either way, you will leave that conversation feeling heard and walking away with more clarity than you came in. The link is down in the description. I love to talk with you, so thank you for being here and God bless. I'll see you in the next talking toddlers.