The recent evidence on television applies to broadcast-style programming, not feature-length films. And the indication of significant, demonstrable negative effects are all from one British study carried out by one man based upon his review of numerous studies that presented their results as inconclusive. There are problems with his data and his methodology. Prior to his study, there were only a handful of full-blown studies in the area, conducted in the 1960s, that were either inconclusive or demonstrated an acceleration in verbal and cognition skills in young children who watched TV a couple hours a day.
At any rate, attention-span reduction in young children due to broadcast-style television programming is generally attributed to the relatively short segments of story or plot followed by one or two minutes of frenetic advertising. Purely anecdotally, this does make sense to me. Still and all, I think the problems with TV, movies, video games, any sort of solitary entertainment for young children is a lack of parental interaction or mere presence while the children are involved in these activities. It's amazing if you've seen some of the video-taped studies of young children the difference between how the children behave and interact when left alone or with a parent merely in the room, say, reading a book or magazine. In a quality parenting environment children learn from an early age to associate their parents with self-discipline as well as love and care for their basic needs. It shows in these studies.
I would, like you said, do what works for your child. Tom and Jerry and other "classic" cartoons actually calm and relax my three-year-old before bedtime compared to some of the more contemporary "edutainment" programming that's available. Sounds like with your daughter, they wire her up. I think that's just the personality differences of one kid to another.
I wouldn't sweat TV too much. When Gutenberg invented movable type, essentially putting publishing and reading in the hands of, if not the masses, at least a lot more people than could have previously published or read books, a few people hailed him as a genius; most people thought it was the work of the devil. That took a couple of centuries to iron out. Same with photography. Same with film. We're going through the same thing now with what they call Web 2.0 and all these blogs and whatnot. Blogs aren't bad are the end of civilized society; but it takes a while for the greater population to catch up and realize that blogs are more of an entertainment than they are an unquestionable education.
Also like the argument over violent video games. I'll bet cash money your daughter could grow up for the next ten years playing every Grand Theft Auto game that hits the market and never go out and emulate what she plays in the game, never even consider doing such things. But some kids will. It all comes back to parenting style and involvement -- and the brain of the kid in question. And that's not an indictment of any particular parent, either. Some parents, because of socio-economic or maturity factors have no idea how to parent and no one bothers to help them learn; therefore their children get beyond their control and when they realize how serious it's become, it's probably too late to rein most of those kids back in even if their parents knew how to do that.
Bottom line: Under current conditions, the human race will survive. At least another hundred years. Beyond that, I make no promises.
TV for their young child's bedroom? I know every household is different, but our kids share a room and they go to sleep watching dvds. Plus, they also watch one during the day. I have purchased Nemo 3 times now b/c they always end up breaking their copy. I don't copy the dvds, b/c i can't seem to find any mac software that will make a decent copy without making the screen copy as it pans from one side to another. But, I thought, when I get an appletv for the livingroom, i'll just get one for the kids, too.
