Using three kinds of infant and toddler directed videos, the study examines the impact of the following two factors on parent-child interaction for 1-2 year-old children, i.e., the interactions explicitly modeled in the videos and the cultural appropriateness of the videos. Two groups of child–parent dyads participated in the study (24 in the 12-month group and 24 in the 18-month group). Through comparing the parent-child interaction before the video viewing, during the video co-viewing and immediately after video viewing, the results show that after the video viewing, some videos which of rich interactive demonstration may have a positive impact on the quality of parent-child interaction. It implies that parents can learn and utilize the interactive opportunities that the videos provide as a basis for parent-child interaction. However, whether parents are able to benefit from the video is closely related to the characteristics of the video. Videos of rich interactive demonstration and cultural appropriateness can have positive impacts on parent-child interaction after video viewing. A video which has rich interactive demonstration but lack of cultural appropriateness may have no positive impacts on parent-child interaction. Therefore, although interactive demonstration of the video has important influence on the parent-child interaction, the cultural appropriateness is critical to the positive effects of videos. During video viewing, there was a decrease in amount of active parent-child engagement regardless of video condition. One reason is parent and child’s attention to the video, the more parents and children attended to the video, the less they interacted with each other. Another reason is, compared with the quality of parental engagement before the video viewing, the quality of parental engagement significantly decreased while the video was on. The research makes some recommendations about design of the content for infant and toddler directed video. Not only the video content should be appropriate for 1-2 years old children, but also it should take into consideration of how parents can learn from video. Infant and toddler directed videos shall provide effective learning tools for parents in terms of good parent-child interaction. Again, when bring in new videos we shall consider the cultural appropriateness, in particular for some videos that seem wonderful but not culturally appropriate.