Psychologist Dr. Angeline Lillard's 2011 experiment on television pacing, what happened when preschoolers watched nine minutes of frantic animation, and why the children who simply drew came out on top.
Dr. Angeline Lillard is Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia. Her research sits at an unusual and useful crossroads: she studies pretend play, Montessori education, and the effects of media on young children. That combination matters. Most media researchers study screens; most play researchers study play. Lillard studies both, which means when she compares what a cartoon does to a young mind against what an ordinary, unhurried activity does, she knows exactly what she is comparing.
It also means her findings on screens come from someone who has spent a career understanding what young children's attention is for, how it develops, and what kinds of experience build it. When a researcher with that background runs an experiment whose result is immediate, measurable and uncomfortable, it is worth sitting with.
In 2011, Lillard and her colleague Jennifer Peterson published an experiment in the journal Pediatrics with a beautifully simple design. Four year olds were randomly assigned to one of three nine-minute activities: watching a very fast-paced cartoon, watching a slower-paced educational programme, or drawing with crayons and markers. Immediately afterwards, every child completed the same set of standard tasks used to measure executive function: the mental skills behind focusing, waiting, holding instructions in mind and resisting impulses.
The result was stark. The children who had watched just nine minutes of the fast-paced cartoon performed significantly worse on the executive function tasks than the children who had spent those same nine minutes drawing. The slower programme sat in between. Nothing about the children differed beforehand; the groups were randomised. The only difference was what they had done for nine minutes. The effect was not a vague impression or a parental hunch. It showed up immediately, on standardised measures, in a controlled experiment published in one of the world's leading paediatric journals.
The deeper insight is about pacing. The debate about children's television usually fixates on content: is it violent, is it educational, is it age appropriate? Lillard's experiment suggests that this misses something. The fast cartoon was not harmful because of what it depicted but, plausibly, because of how relentlessly it moved: scene changes, cuts and surreal events arriving faster than a 4 year old's brain processes real life. A young mind dragged along at that speed appears to come out the other side temporarily depleted, less able to wait, hold a rule, or control an impulse. Pacing itself, not just content, taxes the young brain. That reframes the whole question a parent faces. It is not only "what is my child watching?" but "how fast is it, and what is it doing to the machinery of their attention?"
The source
Lillard, A. S. & Peterson, J. (2011). The Immediate Impact of Different Types of Television on Young Children's Executive Function. Pediatrics · Read the original
First, the honest limits. This was a single session, and the study measured what happened immediately afterwards, not weeks later. It does not prove that an occasional frantic cartoon causes lasting damage, and no parent should read it as a verdict on one rainy afternoon of television. Children are not made of glass.
But the practical implications are real, and they are unusually actionable because the effect was immediate. Executive function is exactly what a young child needs in the moments that follow screen time: sitting down to lunch, sharing with a sibling, getting shoes on, listening at nursery. If nine minutes of fast animation temporarily drains the system that handles waiting and self-control, then the post-cartoon meltdown so many parents know is not a coincidence and not naughtiness. It may simply be a 4 year old running on an emptier tank than they had half an hour earlier.
Two gentle rules of thumb follow. One: when you do choose screen time, pacing is a better filter than polish. A slow, calm programme that moves at roughly the speed of life asks far less of a preschooler's processing than a frenetic one, whatever the educational claims on the box. Two: timing matters. Fast media just before nursery, mealtimes or bedtime sets a child up to fail at exactly the moments that demand their best self-control. None of this requires guilt, and none of it requires a screen-free household. It requires noticing what the next half hour will ask of your child.
The quiet hero of Lillard's experiment is the third group: the children who drew. They were not given a brain-training programme. They were given crayons, markers and paper, and left to get on with it. And on the executive function tasks that followed, they came out best of all. The condition that protected those fragile, growing capacities was the oldest one available: a slow activity where the child sets the pace.
That is the principle worth taking home, because drawing has plenty of relatives. Watch a 4 year old working a wooden jigsaw at the kitchen table. There are no cuts, no scene changes, nothing arrives faster than her own hands can move. She turns a piece over, frowns, tries it, fails, rotates it, tries again. The pace of the activity is exactly the pace of her thinking, because her thinking is what drives it. When the piece finally drops in with that small, satisfying click, the reward arrived on her schedule, earned by her persistence. A box of traditional wooden puzzles → is, in Lillard's terms, the anti-cartoon: the same nine minutes, spent building the very capacities the fast cartoon drains.
The same is true of threading beads, stacking blocks until the tower wobbles and falls and gets rebuilt, sorting shapes, matching pairs. These activities have a tempo, and the tempo belongs to the child. Nothing flashes, nothing rushes, nothing happens unless small hands make it happen. The weight of a beech block, the slow concentration of a shape finding its hole, the patient back and forth of a counting toy: this is what self-paced looks like, and feels like, to a 3 year old. Jaques of London has been making this kind of slow, hands-on educational toy → since 1795, longer than any games company in the world, and the principle behind them has not changed in 230 years: the child supplies the pace, and the pace is the point.
A parent does not need to choreograph any of this. The practical move is almost embarrassingly small: keep the puzzle, the crayons or the blocks within reach for the moments that might otherwise default to a cartoon, especially the half hour before the day asks something of your child.
The original paper is short, clearly written and freely summarised in the abstract: The Immediate Impact of Different Types of Television on Young Children's Executive Function, Pediatrics (2011). On this site, our screen time guide turns research like Lillard's into practical limits by age, reducing screen time for toddlers offers a gentle route off the cartoon habit, and the science page sets this experiment alongside the wider evidence on play, screens and the developing brain.
No, and Lillard's experiment does not claim that. The damaging condition was a very fast-paced cartoon; the slower programme produced a much milder picture, and the measured effect was immediate rather than proven to be permanent. The sensible reading is about pacing and timing: prefer calm, slowly paced programmes, keep sessions short, and avoid frantic animation right before moments that demand self-control, like meals, nursery drop-off or bedtime.
The study measured children immediately after the nine-minute session, so it tells us about the short term: directly after fast-paced viewing, executive function was measurably worse. It was not designed to track how long the dip lasts or whether repeated daily exposure compounds it. That honest gap cuts both ways: no proof of lasting harm, but also no licence to assume the effect simply vanishes, which is why timing screen use thoughtfully is the low-cost, sensible response.
Think of how quickly the picture changes. Fast-paced children's animation cuts between scenes every few seconds and piles up improbable events far quicker than anything a child meets in real life. A slower programme moves closer to the rhythm of a real day: scenes that last, conversations that unfold, events that follow one another in ways a preschooler can predict. A rough parent's test: if you find the programme exhausting to watch with full attention, it is asking even more of a 4 year old.
The children who drew set their own pace for the full nine minutes: every mark on the page happened when they decided, at the speed of their own thinking. Nothing external dragged their attention along. That self-paced quality is the common thread in activities that seem to protect executive function, and it is shared by puzzles, building blocks, threading, sorting and most traditional hands-on play. The activity follows the child, rather than the child chasing the activity.
Britain's oldest toy maker. Every toy open-ended, wooden, and built for exactly the kind of play the research recommends.