Toddlers shouldn’t watch hours of TV. But ... what if the Dodgers are in the World Series?

At this time of year, nearly every morning before dawn, my 2.5-year-old wakes up, calls me into his room and looks up into my bleary eyes to ask: “Watch baseball?” He wants to watch highlights from yesterday’s games before he goes to day care. After school, he likes to get a quesadilla at a place where we can watch the superheroes Mookie Betts, Kiké Hernández and his idol Shohei Ohtani perform miracles on the field.

My toddler is a total baseball fanatic, and as the Dodgers are back in the World Series, I’ve been wondering whether letting him watch those long games on screens will shrivel his brain like so many parenting TikToks say.

I know those aren’t good sources, so I reached out to experts.

First: Emily Oster, the economist turned parenting sage whose advice is grounded in data. Her books and site, ParentData, provided clarity on many issues before and after my son’s arrival. Could she tell me whether watching sports counts as bad screen time?

“I do not support thinking screen time being good or bad; it’s an unhelpful frame for most parents,” said Oster, deflating my theory a bit. “Instead, we want to think about screen time with the frame of opportunity cost: What would my child be doing other than this?”

She says that caretakers should be mindful of whether screen time is interfering with social activities, rest or other developmental needs: “If your kid is watching nine hours of ‘Cocomelon’ per day, they do not have time for other things: eating, sleeping, and going to school. And that’s a problem. But an hour of TV while you make dinner? That’s a good way for everyone to have a break.”

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends zero screen time from birth to 2 years old, except for video calls with family and friends, and no more than one hour daily from ages 2 to 5.

Dr. Marian Williams, of the the Early Childhood Mental Health Program at Children’s Hospital L.A., has a different approach. Scrolling devices, like phones and tablets, are the worrying kind of screen time: “something that the child can do all by themselves, and get mesmerized by and have a hard time breaking away from.”

Television, on the other hand, can be communal with parents’ help. “What’s happening on screen is important, but what’s happening in the room might be more important,” Williams says. My son could be a case study. I cheer every time Betts slides headfirst into a base, so now whenever my son falls down, he smoothly says “saaaafe” like he’s trying to convince the umpire his steal was legit.

This active experience is what makes television co-viewing different from passive watching, says Tracy Elizabeth, a developmental psychologist and tech leader who managed TikTok’s family safety and developmental health team. When we’re together, she says, my son isn’t just watching Teoscar Hernández hit homers; he’s actually watching me. “He’s learning about you and how to have a relationship with his family,” Elizabeth says. My son still talks about the time Ohtani was hit by a Padres pitcher’s ball twice in the same game. “Ohtani got hit too,” he’ll say whenever I’m explaining why he shouldn’t hit me in the face with a spatula.

While co-viewing helps frame toddlers’ experiences, many experts agree that not all on-screen content contains teachable moments. Commercials could be the real threat to young viewers, in part because they are paced to grab and hold our attention, according to Dr. Jane Tavyev Asher, director of child neurology at Cedars-Sinai. “A toddler’s brain is going to be drawn to that rapid movement,” she said, “causing undesirable wiring to take place in their brain that’s developing very quickly.” Fortunately, it’s easy enough to mute or turn off the advertising.

In contrast, baseball moves slowly and deliberately. The pace of baseball could actually be helping to build attention, some of the experts said.

Regardless of any official recommendations, we parents know that sharing special time with your toddler is an important consideration. At least one expert backed me up on that: “For parents, learning when to break the rules is important,” Williams said. “And when your home team is playing the World Series, that’s one of those times.”

So when the next game in the Series was about to start, I had a decision to make.

“It’s time for Dodger baseball,” I said to my kid with my best Vin Scully voice. I felt confident that a bit of baseball wouldn’t make his brain guacamole, and I had a plan for how we’d interact. After all, he’s watching me, and I get to hang out with my best bud and make dumb jokes. So we cozied up on the couch and watched Ohtani and the gang take the field. And my son was rapt.

We texted videos back and forth with my brother’s Blue Jays-loving family in Toronto. I muted the commercials. We talked, and we pretended to play baseball together. And it was amazing. I had probably made the right call, and who knows: Maybe this moment would be a game-changer for my son’s brain development.

And as it turns out, it really was just a moment. After 30 minutes, he turned to me with a request: “Can we watch ‘Daniel Tiger’?”

Drew Tewksbury is a writer and editor in Los Angeles. He is writing a book about experts’ advice on how to be a better dad.