A guide
We make the videos, and we still think cards are the better default for most families under six months. Here is the honest comparison.
Updated 9 September 2026
The short answer
We make videos, and we still think cards are the better default at this age.
Cards involve no screen at all. You can hold them at exactly the right distance, tilt them, bring them closer, take them away. Your baby decides how long to look, and you can see their face the entire time — which is the part that actually tells you whether any of it is working.
Video earns its place on the days when your hands are full. That is a real and frequent situation, and it is not a failure.
Distance
Clearest vision at birth is at roughly 20 to 30 centimetres — about the distance from a feeding baby's eyes to the face of whoever is holding them. That is not a coincidence.
A card sits naturally in that window because you are holding it. A screen tends to be wherever the screen happens to be: propped on a table, held at whatever distance your arm settled at, or across the room.
This matters more than it sounds, because how big a pattern appears to your baby depends entirely on distance. The same video is a different stimulus at 30 cm and at 2 metres. We publish the arithmetic for three setups partly because it is not obvious.
Control
With cards, when your baby turns away, the session is over — you feel it immediately, because you are the one holding the thing.
Video keeps going. A thirty-minute video runs for thirty minutes regardless of whether anyone is still watching, and it is genuinely easy to leave it running past the point of interest.
Turning away, glazing over, fussing and arching are all ways of saying they have had enough. At this age a few minutes of engaged looking is a complete session, and stopping there is the right call rather than a short-changed one.
Screens
Paediatric guidance generally discourages screen media below roughly 18 to 24 months, apart from video calls. We think that is sound, and we would rather say so plainly than tiptoe around it.
What we can offer is a clear account of what is actually on the screen when a family does reach for one — the contrast, the pattern size, the pace — so the decision is at least an informed one.
Video
Two things, honestly.
Motion. A card cannot move smoothly. Tracking a slowly moving object is a real developing skill from around six to eight weeks, and it is difficult to produce by hand at a consistent speed.
Your hands. A card needs a person holding it. Some days there isn't one spare, and a few minutes of something calm and well made is a perfectly reasonable answer to that.
If you do use video, the things worth checking are the same either way: is it really high contrast, are the shapes big enough, does it move slowly, and do scenes get time to land. There is a short guide to that here.
Making your own
You do not need to buy anything. Thick white card and a black marker will do it: concentric circles, a simple checkerboard with large squares, wide stripes, a single bold dot.
Keep the shapes big — larger than you think — and keep each card to one idea. Prop them where your baby is looking, at roughly 25 to 30 cm, and swap them when interest fades.
That is most of what the first three months need. Everything else, including ours, is a convenience on top of it.