Toddlers: you can’t get them NOT to touch.

The American Association of Pediatrics—an authoratative voice in parenting standards—this week released guidelines for media consumption for kids under 2.

As far as passive tv goes, it’s a resounding “no”, but the AAP didn’t address interactive media like iPads.

Being a grabby, experimental group of folks, toddlers seem to find gestural interfaces very intuitive. Amber MacArthur showed a video of her 2-year-old son at the Canadian Marketing Association of Manitoba’s Digital Day launching & playing Angry Birds. Apparently he’s at level 8 now.

Amber went on to tell the story of how baffling it was for her son to encounter an LCD tv that did not respond to touch.

We found the same thing with the Tactica Toddler—at 9 months, she could interact with Talking Carl on the iPhone and understand that she was initiating the character’s repsponses.

As we wrote at the time, “Touch screen interfaces are so intuitive that people who can’t read (or even recognize symbols) can learn to use them immediately. The barrier posed by interface learning curve is reduced or eliminated.” The Tactica Toddler henceforth poked at every screen she came across, expecting it to respond.

And making the rounds this week is a video of a toddler confused by why paper images aren’t interactive.

Competitiveness stirred, we’re initiating heavy Angry Birds training, at least until the AAP says we shouldn’t.