Even more disturbing was an interview Thomas did with an educational consultant named Iris Sroka. Sroka’s company, the Hypothesis Group, advises networks on the educational value of kids’ shows, and as part of its research on a Playhouse Disney show, she and her colleagues observed a videotape of preschoolers in Jackson Heights watching the program. It was designed to get kids moving, but the children just sat there. The consultants reviewed the tape of the kids and became concerned that they could not say the show improved motor skills. Then one consultant saw that a child was moving two fingers in a kicking pattern, mimicking the kicking onscreen. The company gave the show credit for “developing coordination and control of movement.”

The scariest finding in Thomas’s book is that “educational” TV shows might hamper a child’s development. A 2004 study of babies from 6 to 30 months found that watching Sesame Street was negatively related to expressive language use (frequency of single- and multiple-word utterances) and watching Teletubbies was negatively related to both vocabulary size and expressive language use. Even background TV (shows adults watch when the kids are in the room) seemed to harm kids; one study found its presence diminished both the length of children’s play episodes and their degree of focused attention during play. Thomas cited Jean Piaget, who said that young children have to understand what an object is before they can see it represented in another format, like TV. All these programs, if watched too young, had the potential to mess with the natural learning process.

I was still reading Buy Buy Baby after I had put D to sleep and when Charles and I were eating dinner in front of Cops, a show he says helps him wind down. “You’ve got to read this,” I said.

He gave me the same look he gave when he saw me reading How to Improve Your Marriage Without Talking About It. “No, I don’t,” he said, as a 60-year-old female crack addict insisted that the pipe wasn’t hers.

“It says that TV’s bad for babies.”

“TV’s not bad! I grew up on it. Look how I turned out.” Then he turned back to the TV and said, “Take that, bitch!” as the cop arrested the grannie crackhead.

“I think we should limit her usage,” I said. “It’ll be better for her, and it’ll improve our marriage because I’ll be happier.”

“You know what would improve our marriage? If you stop reading crap like that.”

Thus began the battle over the remote. Each morning, I would go into D’s room, get her out of bed, and give her some milk and a banana. When I was finished making breakfast, I would find her rocking on her rocking chair or removing the contents of my wallet or jumping off the coffee table, but she never got hurt and she never asked for TV.

After half an hour, Charles would come in, find me reading the paper—a.k.a. ignoring our child—while D ate, and flip on Sesame Street on PBS. “But she’s happy!” I’d say, shutting it off.

“Elmo!” D would shout pleadingly, and he’d turn it back on.

One evening, I came home at 5:30 to find Charles cooking dinner while D watched Maurice Sendak’s Little Bear, the last show on Noggin before it becomes “the N” and plays teen-interest shows. I flipped it off. “If you’re gonna turn it off,” he said, “then you need to wrangle.”

“Of course I will,” I said, and then I left D in the living room and went into my bedroom to send some e-mails. A few minutes later, I heard a crash and a cry and I came in to find him kissing a boo-boo she’d gotten falling off her booster seat.

“I thought you were watching her!” he said.

“She doesn’t need to be watched every second. It’s all right for her to be bored. To have a high signal-to-noise ratio.”

“Is that from that goddamned book? TV makes her happy. Why do you have to have such an agenda?”

“Because I think TV is harmful. She’s already very hyperactive. In Studio Creative Play, she barely sits down for the activities. She just runs around the room. I think she might be ADHD.”

“She’s not ADHD! She’s an iconoclast! There’s a difference.”

That night in bed, I realized that Charles and I have completely different relationships with television. He was a child of divorce and had watched a lot of TV as a kid. As a result, he found it comforting. He saw it as benign. I had grown up listening to NPR and watching maybe four hours of TV a week, mostly when the entire family would gather for programs like The Cosby Show and Family Ties. We didn’t have cable, and I only rarely watched when I didn’t know what was on.