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A new Kaiser Family Foundation study of 8- to 18 year-olds has found that the amount of time young people spend sitting in front of screens of all kinds—from TVs to computers to iPods to cell phones—has increased dramatically over the past five years. In fact, young people now spend more time using their cell phones to send messages, listen to music, play games, and watch TV than they spend talking on them.

It probably comes as little surprise to learn that at least 1 in 1.66 (60%) children in this age group watch television every day, whether it’s on a screen held in the palm of their hand or a giant one mounted to the wall. Among 8-to-10-year-olds, 1 in 4.35 clock in at 5 hours or more per day. As for using the Internet, at least 1 in 3.03 children between 5 and 17 make sure to sign in it at least once a day.

But what about their year-old siblings?

Right about the time we were getting ready to welcome a new century, digital media companies decided to go after their youngest market ever. Brainy Baby and Baby Einstein debuted in the mid 1990’s, and were quickly joined by a host of similar video offerings such as Bee Smart Baby, Bilingual Baby, and so on. Despite the recommendations of the American Academy of Pediatrics, which maintains that children under 2 should watch no screen media at all, at least 1 in 2.33 children under the age of 2 now watches television on a daily basis.

More recently, new computer games designed for babies and toddlers have emerged in the digital world, including Giggles Computer Funtime for Baby, Kiddiegames, and Kneebouncers. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimated in 2006 that only 3-5% of children under the age of 2 have played video games or used a computer—but the current proliferation of these sites suggests that’s changing. More kids are watching screen media at the youngest possible ages, drawn into the digital world before they’ve mastered all the laws of reality. It’s a new way to grow up, but is it a good way? Researchers who study the phenomenon say it’s too early to know.

So far, most of the research has concentrated on television and video programming in the form of DVDs, in part because they have been around so much longer than baby video games and remain the dominant media for these very young children. It’s been established that preschoolers derive genuine benefit from watching educational and age-appropriate shows like Sesame Street—they gain larger vocabularies, do better on school readiness tests, and even earn higher grades in high school English.

But kids younger than 2 do not appear to reap the same rewards from television, educational or otherwise. In fact, studies have shown that babies under 2 years who watch videos have poorer language skills, smaller vocabularies, and poorer reading comprehension and attention later on than their counterparts who didn’t watch TV in those first few years. This may be in part, as researchers at the University of Washington found, because videos aimed at babies contain few words, and images with no understandable description. Recently, Baby Einstein withdrew the claims of educational benefits they once advertised.

The new computer games aimed at infants are trickier to evaluate—mostly because they’re just so new and have not been as widely adopted, giving researchers little to work with. One study looked at 4-year-old children, and found that—although the children responded to the interactivity and visual events of a computer game—they missed out on the vocabulary lessons intended. However, computers by their nature are interactive, whereas television is not, and they may yet prove to be of greater educational value for very young children.

Part of the reason it appears infants don’t respond as well to electronic education as their slightly older peers may be because it’s just not the right learning venue for their stage of life. The first 2 years are some of the most critical in the human lifetime: the brain more than doubles in size as babies take in the experiences of the world around them. They learn about cause and effect, pick up the basics of their native language, coordinate their limbs and figure out (often the hard way) the laws of physics. Up until the last century all of this learning occurred experientially—everything they saw and tasted and felt applied to the real world. But televisions and computer screens don’t show the real thing, just symbols, designed to represent reality. That’s a tough concept for someone still nailing down the fact that cups are for drinking and clothes are for wearing.

One real worry is that hours spent staring at a screen may detract from time that babies could spend exploring and interacting with their environment. After all, the world’s a pretty extraordinary place, especially when you’ve only been in it for a few months.