In January, Governor Kathy Hochul administered her 2025 State of the State address, outlining her plans and goals for improving the lives of New York’s residents, with a particular focus on families and children. Among her ambitions for improving children’s physical and mental health was continuing to direct the state’s Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services (DHSES) in developing a guide for teachers in leading media literacy education in the classroom. Just over a week later, the New York State Education Department (NYSED) published the aforementioned toolkit, which includes age-relevant questions and facts, discussion prompts, relevant definitions, and links to trusted resources to continue the conversation on media literacy in the classroom. The guide, which NYSED distributed to all schools,  describes provisions and resources for students from kindergarten through twelfth grade.  At first glance, this approach is comprehensive. After all, teaching critical thinking skills to a six-year-old is massively different from teaching it to a college-bound senior, yet it is necessary at all ages and stages. That said, the K-12 focus of this executive project does not mention New York’s most vulnerable children: those younger than five years of age. 

Recent studies on screen use among children have found that students consume more and more media before they even enter kindergarten. Infants up to two-year-olds spend an average of 49 minutes a day on screens, with that number jumping to 2 hours and 30 minutes for the 2-4-year-old age bracket. “Problematic media use,” or aggressive pathological behavior joined by a difficulty regulating attachment to screens, can begin as early as two and a half years old and steadily increases as one nears kindergarten age. By the time students enter school, the primary avenue for citizenship development and learning, they may already have an attachment to media as a primary source of information. Children are becoming increasingly attached to their screens, and, more often than not, neglect to question what they read on the internet, especially in the contexts of deceptive advertising and, later on, manipulated information regarding current events. New York must ensure that its children can analyze the content they consume before they become hooked – and that benchmark is getting earlier and earlier. 

Arguably, teaching media literacy to infants, toddlers, and preschoolers may be too tall of an order, with most children unable to read at these ages. However, this does not mean it is impossible. Although expanding media literacy to early childhood seems lofty, research organizations, advocates, and educators have already laid the groundwork for age-appropriate interventions. The Erikson Institute, a nonprofit research center dedicated to early childhood development, has published a guide including age-appropriate activities for the youngest children to learn how to engage and analyze the media they consume. The National Association for the Education of Young Children, a leading authority on childcare policy research, developed a toolkit for teaching media literacy to children as young as two. Weaving critical thinking into play is not a new concept — it New York’s early education leadership can and should embrace it. With the right coalitions and efforts from NYSED and DHSES, this project can be implemented in Early Childhood Education centers across the state. 

As New York State legislators continue to fight towards mandating media literacy education in schools for the K-12 sect, state agencies must expand available resources to include best practices for teaching critical thinking in early childhood settings, similar to how NYSED and DHSES created the guidebook for teachers of older students. This guidebook could include resources to age-appropriate activities, explanations of critical thinking suitable for children just developing language skills, and resources to provide to parents from the school. 

Taking these measures would be incredibly beneficial for young children enrolled in the publicly-funded Head Start programs for low-income youth — children between birth and eight years of age in low-income families stack up over twice the screen time of their higher-income peers, therefore making them more vulnerable to misinformation early in life. In a sociopolitical climate wrought by national threats and the immediate impacts of misinformation online, New York is taking a great first step, but Governor Hochul and state agencies should look to protecting children in their very first steps.