**2. Children and movies: folk wisdom and its pitfalls**

In the UK in 1917, an independent inquiry on children and the cinema, commissioned by the National Council for Public Morals with the backing of cinema exhibitors, concluded that "the cinema, under wise guidance, may be made a powerful influence for good; if neglected, if its abuse is unchecked, its potentialities for evil are manifold." ([2], p. xxi). This judgement encapsulates what could be called the "risks or benefits paradigm" which dominated research and policy in relation to children and movies until the second decade of the 21st century. In all cases, the potential benefits are dependent on substantial safeguards, e.g. "wise guidance", and are not exemplified further than the *possibility* of "influence", whereas the risks look quite threatening: for example it's implied that "abuse" is inevitable. But equally telling is the way movies are referred to: they are not considered as a diverse, complex and evolving cultural form, open to critical analysis, but as a kind of undifferentiated, ever-present phenomenon. This perspective has endured: the idea that television is pretty much all the same and that children are "exposed" to it, rather than watching it (so, a bit like rain) has meant that some researchers have had no qualms about trying to test children's responses to television by getting them to watch commissioned bits of crudely constructed video, rather than actual TV programmes, and had little if anything to say about the stylistic or generic features of TV itself (e.g. [3–8]).

The need for "wise guidance" and the danger of "manifold potentialities for evil" remained the dominant, if less luridly described concerns in research on children's relationships with movies for the rest of the 20th century. Advice to parents based on this research nevertheless had to recognise that most parents were

#### *Toddlers and Movies: A Fresh Approach DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.100259*

unlikely to take much notice of detailed guidance for managing their children's movie-watching, given their need for time to cook meals or take showers without having their toddlers underfoot. A compromise was found in the widely-accepted "two-hour rule" – the maximum daily amount of television-viewing that any child of two or older should be allowed (under-twos should not watch at all) – which the American Academy of Paediatrics recommended in 1999 [9] and which has been widely quoted. Today, many parents still nervously try to adhere to it without knowing where it comes from or what the ill-effects of movie-watching are supposed to be. And toddlers can be observed every day in shops, restaurants and public transport, sitting in their buggies or highchairs and happily poring over games, apps or YouTube on their parents' smartphones or on iPads. In February 2021, Google's 16.5 million results for a search on "lists of movies for toddlers" was headed by Good Housekeeping's "The 15+ Best Toddler Movies for When You Need a Short Break", whose introductory text, after a brief nod to the AAP's "two-hour rule", sympathetically supports movies' "child-minder" role, carefully emphasising what we are all supposed to believe: that parents will only want to leave their kids watching movies for a "little bit of time" [10] – although most of the recommended movies are at least 90 minutes long!

The folly of attempting to impose a simple time-based "rule" on a complex cultural activity is finally beginning to be acknowledged: for example, in their study of parental anxieties about "screen time", Blum-Ross and Livingstone argue that "for parents caught between fears of media harms and hopes for a digital future, a more nuanced consideration of the nature and purpose of screen media in different contexts is now urgent." ([11], p. 185). Although they do not go into detail about what "nuanced" and "different contexts" might mean, this is an important challenge to researchers and one that I address in this chapter.
