Puppy Dog Pals

Well, really screen time and kids.

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 as if it were some kind of 1920s silent movie.

We’d 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 the Covid-19 pandemic, 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 2 developed brain changes that led to slower decision-making and increased anxiety by their teenage years.

Writing in eBioMedicine, 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.”

Metaphor: 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 3 and 4 years of age didn’t show these same effects. The critical window is infancy — specifically, before age 2 — 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. This far exceeds World Health Organization recommendations.

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

In a related 2024 Psychological Medicine study, the same team found that parent-child reading counteracts some of these brain changes. Among children whose parents read to them frequently at age 3, the link between infant screen time and altered brain development weakened significantly.

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

Postscript: We had a snow day yesterday out of school, and like lots of other parents we fought the Battle of No Screens a bit.

Key solution: Taking the kid sledding on the giant hill near our house, with probably 100 other parents and kids there too.

I promise you: It was nowhere near as quiet as a silent episode of Puppy Dog Pals.

---

Other things worth knowing …

• What else can be done to force President Trump’s Department of Justice to release all the Epstein files? Legal experts weigh in. (The Guardian)

• Another government shutdown is a near-certainty, as key Senate Democrats vowed to oppose a budget deal including funding for DHS and ICE after federal agents shot and killed a Minneapolis man. Separately, TikTok users said videos they posted about the shooting or criticizing ICE were suppressed, days after a deal was finalized to spin off the U.S. business to new investors who are allies of President Trump. TikTok blamed “a power outage.” (New York Times, The Washington Post)

• Fox News: Senior “federal sources involved immigration enforcement” who “support the mass deportation agenda, but have serious hesitations about the way it is being carried out and the messaging that comes with it” say they “believe this is going to end up being what they call a ‘bad shoot.’” After this reporting, the government suddenly demoted Border Patrol “commander at large” Gregory Bovino, returning him to his former job in California with an understanding he will retire soon. (Fox News’s Bill Melugin, on X; The Atlantic)

Bill Melugin@BillMelugin_

NEW: Since yesterday's deadly shooting in MN, I've talked to more than half a dozen federal sources involved immigration enforcement, including several in senior positions, who all tell me they have grown increasingly uneasy & frustrated w/ some of the claims & narratives DHS

11:43 PM · Jan 25, 2026 · 5.79M Views

---

2.4K Replies · 2.09K Reposts · 10.1K Likes

• Jeson Nelon Presilla Flores, a suspect in a 2022 Southern California jewellery heist valued at $100 million, was deported to Ecuador in December. Prosecutors told the the decision to deport Flores was taken “unbeknownst” to them, and that they “remain eager to prosecute” him in the highly unlikely event he ever returns to the U.S. (The Independent)

• After 80-year bond, Germans find breaking up with the U.S. is hard to do: To many Germans, Americans were saviors after World War II, and they feel especially hurt over President Donald Trump’s disdain for Europe and traditional alliances. (The Washington Post)

• Like digging ‘your own professional grave’: The translators grappling with losing work to AI. (CNN)

---

Thanks for reading. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments.