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Old February 5th, 2008 #1
Alex Linder
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Default TV and Children

Baby Einsteins: Not So Smart After All

Monday, Aug. 06, 2007

By ALICE PARK

The claim always seemed too good to be true: park your infant in front of a video and, in no time, he or she will be talking and getting smarter than the neighbor's kid. In the latest study on the effects of popular videos such as the "Baby Einstein" and "Brainy Baby" series, researchers find that these products may be doing more harm than good. And they may actually delay language development in toddlers.

Led by Frederick Zimmerman and Dr. Dimitri Christakis, both at the University of Washington, the research team found that with every hour per day spent watching baby DVDs and videos, infants learned six to eight fewer new vocabulary words than babies who never watched the videos. These products had the strongest detrimental effect on babies 8 to 16 months old, the age at which language skills are starting to form. "The more videos they watched, the fewer words they knew," says Christakis. "These babies scored about 10% lower on language skills than infants who had not watched these videos."

It's not the first blow to baby videos, and likely won't be the last. Mounting evidence suggests that passive screen sucking not only doesn't help children learn, but could also set back their development. Last spring, Christakis and his colleagues found that by three months, 40% of babies are regular viewers of DVDs, videos or television; by the time they are two years old, almost 90% are spending two to three hours each day in front of a screen. Three studies have shown that watching television, even if it includes educational programming such as Sesame Street, delays language development. "Babies require face-to-face interaction to learn," says Dr. Vic Strasburger, professor of pediatrics at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine and a spokesperson for the American Academy of Pediatrics. "They don't get that interaction from watching TV or videos. In fact, the watching probably interferes with the crucial wiring being laid down in their brains during early development." Previous studies have shown, for example, that babies learn faster and better from a native speaker of a language when they are interacting with that speaker instead of watching the same speaker talk on a video screen. "Even watching a live person speak to you via television is not the same thing as having that person in front of you," says Christakis.

http://www.time.com/time/health/arti...650352,00.html
 
Old February 6th, 2008 #2
Alex Linder
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Default Re: TV and Children

NOTE:

I'm not looking for comments in these archive subforums, just studies. I will edit or arrange them as necessary.
 
Old March 3rd, 2008 #3
Alex Linder
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A One-Eyed Invader in the Bedroom

By TARA PARKER-POPE

March 4, 2008

By some estimates, half of American children have a television in their bedroom; one study of third graders put the number at 70 percent. And a growing body of research shows strong associations between TV in the bedroom and numerous health and educational problems.

Children with bedroom TVs score lower on school tests and are more likely to have sleep problems. Having a television in the bedroom is strongly associated with being overweight and a higher risk for smoking.

One of the most obvious consequences is that the child will simply end up watching far more television — and many parents won’t even know.

In a study of 80 children in Buffalo, ages 4 to 7, the presence of a television in the bedroom increased average viewing time by nearly nine hours a week, to 30 hours from 21. And parents of those children were more likely to underestimate their child’s viewing time.

“If it’s in the bedroom, the parents don’t even really know what the kids are watching,” said Leonard H. Epstein, professor of pediatrics and social and preventive medicine at the School of Medicine and Biomedical Science at the State University of New York at Buffalo. “Oftentimes, parents who have a TV in the kids’ bedrooms have TVs in their bedrooms.”

Moreover, once the set is in the child’s room, it is very likely to stay. “In our experience, it is often hard for parents to remove a television set from a child’s bedroom,” Dr. Epstein said.

Dr. Epstein and his colleagues put monitoring devices on bedroom TVs and all the other sets in the house. In one two-year study, the devices in half the homes were programmed to reduce children’s overall viewing time by half. (Children had to use a code to turn on any TV in the home, and the code stopped working once the allocated TV time for the week had been reached.)

Although all the children in the study gained weight as they grew, relative body mass index dropped among those with mandatory time limits. The researchers found that cutting into TV time did not increase exercise levels. Instead, the children snacked less, lowering their consumption more than 100 calories a day. The study, published Monday in The Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, did not break down the data by bedroom television viewing.

But in 2002, the journal Pediatrics reported that preschool children with bedroom TVs were more likely to be overweight. In October, the journal Obesity suggested that the risk might be highest for boys. In a study among French adolescents, boys with a bedroom television were more likely than their peers to have a larger waist size and higher body fat and body mass index.

The French study also showed, not surprisingly, that boys and girls with bedroom TVs spent less time reading than others.

Other data suggest that bedroom television affects a child’s schoolwork. In a 2005 study in The Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, researchers looked at the television, computer and video game habits of almost 400 children in six Northern California schools for a year. About 70 percent of the children in the study had their own TV in the bedroom; they scored significantly and consistently lower on math, reading and language-arts tests. Students who said they had computers in their homes scored higher.

Why a bedroom television appears to have such a pronounced impact is unclear. It may be that it’s a distraction during homework time or that it interferes with sleep, resulting in poorer performance at school. It could also suggest less overall parental involvement.

Another October study, published in Pediatrics, showed that kindergartners with bedroom TVs had more sleep problems. Those kids were also less “emotionally reactive,” meaning that they weren’t as moody or as bothered by changes in routine. While that sounds like a good thing, the researchers speculated that having a TV in the bedroom dampened the intensity with which a child responded to stimulation.

Another study of more than 700 middle-school students, ages 12 to 14, found that those with bedroom TVs were twice as likely to start smoking — even after controlling for such risk factors as having a parent or friend who smokes or low parental engagement. Among kids who had a TV in the bedroom 42 percent smoked; among the others, the figure was 16 percent.

“I think it matters quite a lot,” Dr. Epstein said. “There are all kinds of problems that occur when kids have TVs in their bedroom.”

So while many parents try to limit how much television and what type of shows their children watch, that may be less than half the battle. Where a child watches is important too.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/he...ml?ref=science
 
Old April 21st, 2014 #4
ayan05
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Why a bedroom television appears to have such a pronounced impact is unclear. It may be that it’s a distraction during homework time or that it interferes with sleep, resulting in poorer performance at school.
 
Old April 15th, 2020 #5
bedford
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You can find the stats for the amount of time spent watching TV for each age group in theor current World Almanac. The average tv time for all Americans is 29 hours per week andfor people over 55 it is 46 hours per week. That is over 6 hours per day. No wonder people are not exercising enough. They are begging out in front of the idiot tube all the time. Plus there is a direct link between time spent watching TV and obesity

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