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. He

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