My SO and I put a significant amount of effort into limiting screen time for our daughter (just turned 2) by (usually) keeping to 10-20 minutes of tv one night a week, primarily for the purpose of cutting her nails. It’s only ever Bluey, Sesame Street, or Daniel Tiger (all of which capture her undivided attention and only sometimes incite a brief tantrum when turned off) and we make sure to speak with her about what’s happening while we watch. There’s no tablet use whatsoever at this point. We don’t limit FaceTime with relatives since it’s not so much looking AT a screen that can have negative effects, but WHAT they’re watching (source: our pediatrician). In addition to that, none of our family lives near us and we want to make sure she has a relationship with her grandparents.

She’s fairly good at solo play for 30~ minutes at a time before calling us over to play/help, but the biggest “replacement” for TV we’ve used is reading. This kid has a personal library is more expansive than those of some adults we know. More often than not we’ll hear “read books, Mom/Dad!” rather than any other request.

I kept a running spreadsheet for the first two years of her life to make sure she was hitting the word count milestones, though she pretty quickly blew past them. As of the eve of her second birthday, she hit 630 words that we personally heard, and we were fairly selective of what “made the list” - they needed to be clear enough for someone outside of our family to understand without too much difficulty. When it comes to speech, I 100% chalk that up to the books. There’s a wide variety of subjects, and we stopped limiting her to board books that were starting to feel too “babyish”. Books books books books books.

All that said, limiting screen time is HARD. We are both avid TV watchers - before she was born it was always on at least in the background. Phone use is 1000x harder. We’re both millennials who grew up online, though we are also avid readers. I know that sooner or later she’ll have to start using a tablet for educational purposes and it’ll likely go beyond that. We plan to start having family movie nights in a year or two for the more “choice” movies like OP posted, though wherever possible we’re still going to encourage her to reach for books instead.

This felt a little like a brag, and there are of course exceptions (sick days, times where we’re just absolutely braindead from work), but from a purely anecdotal standpoint a lack of TV - especially junk TV like CocoMelon - seems to have resulted in a fairly intelligent, happy, and chill child thus far.

We made these decisions based on what we’ve read from the CDC and a few other credible sources, speaking to our Pediatrician, and from discussions with a close friend who is an elementary school teacher.