No TV for children under 2, urge doctors
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The only line in that article that I take issue with is the following: Even so-called educational videos do not benefit children under 2 because they are too young to be able to understand the images on the screen, the doctors’ group said.
Maybe it's because we read to my son daily and have incorporated teaching him sign language from the time he was 4 months, but he most definitely can recognize the images on the screen and frequently both speaks and signs the correct image on the screen (balloon, duck, dog, car). If we had never done any of these activities with him then I highly doubt he would be able to recognize the images on the TV, and there might be a distinction between understanding and recognizing that I am not making, but he most definitely is displaying some sort of connection between the images on the TV and the books/drawings/in person experiences he has.
I think the key take away from this, or other studies of its kind, is that passive media should not be the influential experience that a child so young should be exposed to.
If you don't mind elaborating on this, why did you teach him sign language?
As a counter-point, my daughter did not pick up on sign language at all. The advice that we got was to stick with a single sign and keep at it until she signed it back at us. My wife chose "Milk," but that was probably a poor choice. I don't think that she recognized "Milk" as being an object until well after she was speaking. It wasn't until she started drinking non-breast milk that she started saying "milk."
Now she's 19 months old and the only sign language that she know is "more," but she has an great vocabulary. She can even say her own name and the names of all of her friends. (It's also really cute when she says 'zombie')
> I've heard that it can lead to less frustration when the
> child has a means to communicate with the parents.
Our first kid is now 5 and doesn't really remember any signs, but he said sentences and told stories even in sign language before he could speak well.
To add to this: My son is 30 months, and his speech is coming along well, but one really fascinating part is how he will construct sentences that are far more elaborate than what he can say, and substitute "missing" words for with a specific sound.
It is clear these aren't "just" sounds from how he'll repeat phrases with the right number of "words", just some of them are padded out because he doesn't know how to say them yet, and then gradually more words will get added to the various phrases as he figures out how to pronounce them.
For example, we would point at a bottle of milk to see if he wanted some, and he would soon start copying our gesture by holding up one hand as if a bottle placed upright, and pointing at it with his other hand. Soon he would do that whenever he wanted milk, before he got thirsty enough to start crying.
A lot less guesswork for us, and a lot less crying for him.
We also read every night, but don't do the sign language thing.
Yes, that line basically tells me that either these doctors don't have kids or they haven't been paying attention to them.
1. At a restaurant with TVs, we've observed our child go from laughing and socially engaged, to completed zoned out and unaware of people in mere seconds, just because the television appeared in his field of view. :-(
2. At less than three months of age, he had a fit when pulled away from the television, under the watch of in-laws.
3. Both parents have iPhones, Macbooks, and have a tendency to flop in front of the TV (Roku, Hulu, Daily Show) in the evening. Our no screen time policy prevents us from gazing into our own screens without paying attention to the needs of our son.
4. Finally, most advertising is obnoxious and has no place in my home. Why expose our infant to it? He'll have the rest of his life to be accosted by ads.
We now limit to just 1/2 hour per day per child in a family of iphones, ipads, itv, laptops, kindle, etc.
As a result, our oldest who collectively has as much screen time as our youngest is into reading/writing, drawing and someday soon I intend to get her writing some code. Of course, your millage may very, and I'm not quick to judge others when it comes to parenting. Not an easy task.
Really? My son was not even able to have a fit at 3 months old. He was pretty blob-like...
At that age they are just passively interacting with the world, so it would really make no difference it they stare at the TV, a mobile toy or the parents interacting with each other. Whichever is most colorful or resambles a face is more likely to attract attention. It's only after three months or so that you can say that the baby can somewhat interact with anything.
Again, I don't disagree with the overall point, I just wonder if their interest that you are experiencing is due to the intrigue of something new and not necessary zoning out just because it is a tv.
It's like the visual equivalent of a mosquito buzzing by my ear; not at all desirable, but extremely difficult to tune out.
Advertising for products used by children has changed dramatically over the past few decades. Juliet Schor's book Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture documents the change and the strategies used.
It is one of the most influential books about raising children I read.
[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0684870568/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp...]
That alone makes paying for a series on iTunes worth it for me.
If you're watching more than about an hour of TV per day as a new parent then you either have a staff of people caring for your kid or you're slacking off.
If you don't converse with the child's other parent or others in the household b/c the TV is the center of everyone's attention, then you have a relationship problem or dysfunctional family situation.
This anti-TV meme is mostly luddite fearmongering intended to get joe and jane sixpack to stop vegging out in front of the TV and start being engaged as parents.
Sure, having disengaged parents or parents that don't interact verbally will create an impoverished environment for a kid, but it's not the fault of the glowing box anymore than it would be the fault of the chess board if the parents gazed silently at the board for hours at a time and ignored the little one.
That is not what the Academy of Pediatrics is actually saying. They specifically say that you as the parent is not required to engage with your child the whole time - however if you are NOT engaged with them, you are still better having the TV off, because children gain valuable skills from solitary play.
In other words, it's not a simplistic case of "Parents better than TV"; it really is a case of "no TV better than TV".
Obviously with all these things, quantity does matter.
I should add the other benefit of no screen time before two: when you finally do introduce programming, at least in my experience, kids are far more highly engaged with it, so when you expose them to it later it seems to "take" better. Anecdotally, the kids who are exposed to it as babies seem to also not to focus attentively on it when they are older, so if you do want to take advantage of the screen's great educational potential (not talking about the Baby Einstein crap), you do seem to be better off holding off for the first couple of years.
It just seems like quite an oversimplification to say that all TV is neutral or harmful to development.
My kid is 15 months and we occasionally play "signing time" sign language training DVDs. She's learned a lot of spoken vocabulary from it, and appears to be in the 99th percentile for language development. She doesn't typically sign anything (except for milk) but the other day I asked her what the sign is for a few things and she actually seems to know them.
There is no way to tell for certain, but I credit the signing time videos with giving her a very clear sense of core (verbal and signed) language symbolism. The repetition of words, signs, and pictures has always seemed quite interesting to her, with the less familiar, more abstract words/concepts initially seeming a bit less interesting and subsequently gaining significance as her overall awareness improved.
I have noticed on the few occasions when we've had a movie or show on the TV when she's been around that she'll initially pay close attention to it and then after a minute or two begin to stare blankly at it... this is quite the opposite reaction she has to the signing time videos.
So to summarize I'm skeptical that it makes sense to generalize too much about the specific age ranges when kids are "ready" for various stimuli. I think that metaphor is stretched too far. Instead, a child will find certain stimuli intensely interesting (including some stuff that may be on a TV). To the extent that the child can conceptualize the structure of the stimulus enough to provoke learning, the stimulus can be considered "good" or beneficial to learning. But the developing brain will also get overwhelmed, so after a certain point even a good stimulus becomes noise and can only lead the child to exert effort to tune it out, which would use up cognitive effort for something without any learning benefit.
Do you want to program your kids mind, or are you going to let someone else do it .. ?
It is incredibly sad how many children are put in front of a TV all day. And not Sesame Street or even cartoons - but Soap Operas, Jerry Springer, Cops, Fox News etc. Picture a dirty trailer home, behind on rent, no job, fast food for every meal and a rented 52-inch rear-projection TV that is on all. the. time.
When health care professionals make statements like this, the bad parents are who they are picturing in their head. They know the good parents (like the ones that read HN) can make informed decisions for themselves. But the bad parents have to be told "absolutely no TV" because there is no concept of moderation.
I greatly respect the people I’ve interacted with on HN, but I would stop far short of assuming that intelligence and competence in something like hacking automagically transfers over to an orthogonal skill like parenting. This is partly because of my own anecdotal experience raising children while working in software development, and partly because of what I’ve observed which is that nearly every successful professional class assumes that they are good parents and clearly superior to people who are financially unsuccessful.
Often times, they are. Some people have poor life skills that translate directly into poor parenting skills. Some people have good life skills that seem to cross over directly into good parenting skills. But some poor people are great parents, and some successful people do not practice good parenting... Yet.
One of the attributes of being a good parent is to recognize when you could be even better. Thus, I guess my real message is that regardless of how we view our parenting skills, we ought to be open to the possibility that advice like this may apply to us even if we aren’t living in a trailer.
(Disclosure: I live in an extremely modest cottage that is Toronto’s equivalent to a trailer home).
Dwelling type, of course, is immaterial. I was illustrating a group of people who have extremely poor judgement, children being only one of them (i.e. you shouldn't be renting a giant TV if you can't pay rent or provide for your children).
That is absolutely appalling. Rear-projection? It's 2011, get an LCD already!
(And if I hadn't been that two year old, it's unlikely I'd be the voracious reader and passionate lexidweeb I am now. In fact, it's unlikely I'd even have the same brain, so to speak.)
Now, my parents reading to me most every night (apparently even when I was in the womb) also had a tremendous effect, but when I was a kid my dad traveled for work upwards of 300 days a year. And my mom had to take care of everything else. So there wasn't always someone available to read to me, but Big Bird and Geordi LaForge were there every morning.
Just sayin'.
(If the point of that article wasn't "no TV under 2" but "no bullshit TV under 2," I agree, but I would ammend the statement to "no bullshit TV under 200," or simply "no bullshit.")
When the study says "No TV for infants under 2" they mean babies between birth and their second birthday. And the recommendation isn't about "bullshit" TV, it's about the fact that kids watching a screen aren't interacting with a human being and learning how to communiate. The studies correlating TV watching with delayed speech are very well supported.
[1] Obviously it's likely you were closer to three. And knowing now how parental memories can, heh, embellish things, I strongly suspect that most of your most memorable reading tricks happened when you were, in fact, three.
1. The first word I ever sounded out on my own (at least in an adult's presence) was "Mobil"—from the sign above the gas station near our home in Glendale, CA. (Très Américain, non?) For all I know this was before I turned two.
2. Most of the "embellished" stories regarding my memorable reading tricks come from family members who joined us on a trip to Lake Tahoe in the winter of 88/89 and were astounded/terrified to see me reading things like the snack bar menu. This was beyond the point of sounding out "Mobil" or "Maltodextrin"—I could read the menu, I comprehended that apples were available, and I wanted one.
3. My 2nd birthday was in July of '88. So yes, I was between my second and third birthdays. But no, I wasn't closer to three, or "in fact, three."
Basically, you're saying essentially that parents should ignore clear science and let their kids watch ("non-bullshit") TV because you know a kid who watched a lot of TV and is really smart. That's bad science, and frankly it's bad parenting.
If you want to interpret my decision to describe my admittedly statistically insignificant experience (which is directly related to the topic at hand) as an attempt to flaunt any sort of status, that's your own business.
It isn't really your business to reinterpret the details of my personal life incorrectly to support your argument.
I'm not "saying essentially" that parents (in particular the parents reading this right now) "should" do anything. As has already been addressed in the comments:
1. HN readers (parents or not) are not the target for this recommendation. (What else is new?) 2. Bad parents, or those who are inclined to make bad decisions as parents, might benefit more from advice along the lines of "You stop watching TV, and please get your shit together; alternately, don't have kids," rather than "No TV under n." 3. It's highly likely that the recommendations are intentionally rigid in order to have the strongest impact on those potentially bad parents.
As it pertains to the messaging surrounding the AAP guidelines as reported by the NYT, a lot of it comes across as FUD, to me. For instance, "Secondhand TV" is just a ridiculous thing to say.
Again, I'm not telling anyone do do anything. I am saying that while I don't intend to ignore this study, it's also far from the only data point I'll be taking into consideration as I conduct my own life.
As it turns out, I'm usually the guy mocking people for disregarding science in favor of catchy anecdotal "evidence," "conventional wisdom," or semi-plausible, hippy-dippy alternatives. If my hypothetical future wife wants to play Baby Einstein or Mozart through her uterine wall for our hypothetical future fetus/infant, I'm going to have some questions about why we're doing that, or at least why we're not playing Ryuichi Sakamoto or The Doors instead.
I would find plopping my (fingers crossed) future child down in front of a TV for extended periods unacceptable, regardless of what's playing. I also have some experience which indicates that not all screen viewing is detrimental, and I'll be taking that into account, whether or not it's a statistically defensible position.
Ultimately, I'd hand an iPad (another one of those dangerous screens) running NodeBeat to my one-year-old without a second's hesitation, and I don't really give a shit what the AAP has to say about that.
(edit: Okay, maybe at least a second's hesitation, but moreso for the physical safety of the child and the iPad, not due to concerns about hindering the development of the child's mind. The development of the child's mind is exactly why I would want him/her playing with NodeBeat, etc.)
Does sign language count as communication? Because my son learns signs from occasional DVD watching and then applies them in the proper contexts - sometimes without any reinforcement from his parents or anyone else.
Pretty sure that qualifies as learning how to communicate.
I'll bet good money, however, that however many signs your <2yo son learns from watching a DVD, he would learn more from signing with you instead of passively watching the device. Which, for verbal speech, is exactly what the studies show.
1. I'm really not equipped to show him the multiple images of a coat or someone putting on a coat, or other children doing signs of coat. The video is. I don't know if this matters or not. It's certainly possible it doesn't.
2. I have to make dinner for us all at some point. As much as I'd love for my 15 month old to patiently engage in conversation with me while remaining a safe distance from the stovetop, it just doesn't happen. There are times when a parent's attention just cannot be 100%, or even 75% on their child. So yes, maybe he would learn EVERYTHING better if I were there to teach it to him, but the fact is that even the best parents can't be.
As for point 2, I don't disagree at all. Everything is a tradeoff, no parent can be perfect. Most kids turn out fine anyway. If you have to give your kids TV (my 3 year old gets about two hours a week, for instance) then do so and don't feel guilty. But don't try to justify it as educational; the science disagrees.
Or to put it another way, I'm really seriously doubting I measurably harmed our boy by letting him watch 15 minutes of traditional music videos a day when he was a toddler. (Mostly Liz Carroll, Peter Horan, and Daniel Payne, as I recall.)
Heavy media use in a household is defined as one in which the television is on all or most of the time.What if everyone including the child is regularly out of the house for all but a few waking hours per day?
"the television" -- which one? Does the one in the teenager's bedroom count? How do computers factor in?
Please tell me they used stricter and more thorough criteria than that for "heavy media use".
"The pediatrics group’s guidelines point out that research to date suggests a “correlation between television viewing and developmental problems, but they cannot show causality.”"
What is that statement based on?
If A and B are correlated, it might mean that A -> B, or that B -> A, or that there's a C that leads to both A and B. Without further data, there is no way to distinguish between these possibilities. And often the actual causation is different from what you'd guess based on intuition alone.
More and more papers these days rely on loose correlation to point to conclusions (not saying the linked one is because I didn't actually read the paper, just the link).
I'm sure it's a similar scenario all around, but at least in Brazil, universities are very, very production-driven, so any paper out is better than some good papers out, which leads to a rather poor quality overall.
I see it as a very real possibility that there is a "C" leading to both increased TV consumption and developmental challenges, namely, poor parenting.
There are statistical tools that can be used to control for confounding variables, unfortunately they are not always used correctly. Often a study in psychology relies on methodology to control for confounding variables, using only a chi-squared test (or similar) as their statistical measure. In many of these cases, the data is screaming for the use of a marginally more complex statistical method. A simple linear regression attempting to control for omitted variable bias would be a great improvement in many cases.
When you're making a claim about causation, there is certainly more required than simply statistical evidence of correlation. Even if some of these studies did more work on controlling for omitted variable bias, you would never know it from reading this article and for that reason should take it with a grain of salt.
In fact, where there is a clear and sane hypothesis in play (e.g. "time spent watching TV is time not spent learning to talk") it almost always works out that further science shows the causation that you expect. That's true across fields, and it really shouldn't surprise anyone.
It's just that the experiments required to show that are harder. Simple demographic studies are a lot easier and cheaper. So you do those first, then work up the hard stuff when you know where to look.
Taking your point literally, it would never be useful to do demographics like this because you can't "prove" the causation. But of course that's ridiculous; these studies are immensely useful and improve all our lives.
There can be more than one clear and sane hypothesis, even if it doesn't occur to you immediately. For example, Wilduck below suggests poor parenting as an underlying cause for both these effects.
Here's another example. It is well-known that there is a correlation between the global temperature and the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere (from looking at historical data). It is widely believed that higher CO2 levels lead to higher temperatures. On this basis governments have capped CO2 emissions, with real economic implications. This seems reasonable, doesn't it?
But some scientists who are working on this suggest an alternative explanation; here's the gist of it. There is a lot of CO2 trapped in ice, due to some historical reason that escapes me at the moment (it's not my field). As temperatures rise, ice melts and CO2 is released, leading to higher CO2 levels in the atmosphere. If this is the correct explanation, following your advice and putting caps on CO2 emissions certainly did not "improve all our lives".
"it almost always works out that further science shows the causation that you expect."
Evidence?
"Taking your point literally, it would never be useful to do demographics like this because you can't "prove" the causation. But of course that's ridiculous; these studies are immensely useful and improve all our lives."
Not at all. Sometimes correlation is enough. For example, if an insurance company finds a correlation between having red hair and being involved in more car accidents, they can use this information to their advantage.
Is it? A child that does not speak much takes more effort to engage with in play that does not get boring and tedious to the parent, and may get frustrated with the parent more easily from finding it hard to get their meaning across. In this case more TV would be a "solution" for both parties, and might be arrived at simply because it causes fewer tantrums and less stress for the parents.
I don't believe that's the most likely cause, but I also do believe one should be exceedingly careful about jumping to conclusions about cause based on "common sense" and correlation, because a whole lot of explanations that people would never even think of suddenly seem like common sense after the fact.
> In fact, where there is a clear and sane hypothesis in play (e.g. "time spent watching TV is time not spent learning to talk") it almost always works out that further science shows the causation that you expect.
Does it?
Of course, the best way to demonstrate causality is empirical test with a treatment and control group, but this is rarely possible in social sciences, and in studies like this would be downright unethical.
Thus, we're stuck trying to determine causality, and correlation is a strong tool to help us get there.
We have a four year old who we've tried to limit watching TV, because you can see a noticeable difference in demeanor and attitude when the TV is on versus when playing by themselves or with us. Of course there's going to be some TV time, but for a kid under 2, I would tend to agree with the study, with the addition that even something like an iPad can be much more of a learning tool.
If you asked any worker "why does there have to be a lunch break" they'd look at you like you were insane. I think the same applies here.
I really hope you didn't just say that there's no difference in learning between talking with your kid, or having them zone out in front of the tv.
I spend a lot of time reading to my kids and playing with them. I've seen how much they pick up that way. However, I haven't come across a book or way to hold my 2 yr old's attention to get them to learn ABCs and their sounds. She loves to read and see pictures and point at things but she isn't learning letters that way.
She watches about 15-20 mins of Leapfrog: Letter Factory and I was amazed how quickly she started recognizing her letters.
I'm not suggesting TV is a replacement to reading but rather than another medium of learning is a tool that can be leveraged.
Also my point was more towards the article headline (less so the content) in general where a blanket statement like 'watching TV = bad for infants'. Rather we should find a balance between reading, music, outside play and even TV.
"Even so-called educational videos do not benefit children under 2 because they are too young to be able to understand the images on the screen, the doctors’ group said."
My son watches a DVD from the "Baby Signing Time" series 2-3 times per week. At 15 months, he sports a 30 to 40 word signing vocabulary. While my wife and I work to reinforce many of the more useful signs (more, milk, eat, etc), there are a number that he has picked up straight from the video (banana, coat, cat, etc). As much as I'd like to believe that he's a genius, I think its much more likely that the doctors' group is just wrong about what children can understand on screen.
In the article one frustrated-sounding doctor says no one is listening to the message. Maybe that's because they're preaching zero tolerance rather than moderation. Perhaps that's because they're worried that parents will take moderation too far and they think zero-tolerance is safer. Either way, to say children under two can't learn from a screen is simply wrong. I see the evidence every singe day and the doctors are welcome to see it for themselves.
Of course "under two's" versus 30 months is a big gap, but it's not like he just suddenly started telling us these things either - a lot of the words and phrases he's picked up over the last year comes straight from things he's seen on TV or DVD's.
So, we have been watching TV with my 20-month old daughter since she was around 9 months old. We watch kids shows and talk about it while we watch it together. And she knows exactly what is going on in the show and has for a long time. I'm sure she doesn't understand 100% of it, but it is obvious that she is picking up things.
* She knows the characters by name as soon as they are shown
* She talks about things she sees in the background
* Since last month she sometimes laughs when they do something that is meant to be funny
* She counts out loud to 10 with the characters on TV when they start counting
My feeling is that a constant TV in the background is a distraction for anyone, including babies. But having kids shows AND (here is the key part) watching them together and talking about it, re-enforcing the points of education, talking about the background, and asking questions about what is going on does in fact help with their development.
I agree with the premise that, being able to respond to feedback, and alter and hone their responses over time is a central part of any child's development. TV isn't as passive as some commentators make out - but the mechanisms required to process the sound and images we see in an interactive way require a degree of development that a very young child isn't likely to possess.
There's one thing that I am certain of; I think advertising aimed towards children should be banned. If there's any evil that could (and should) be stopped it's the drastic effect that commercial advertising can have on impressionable minds.
If it were then TV shows would not be interesting.
My guess is that there are two factors which may harm children's development. One is that watching TV until exhaustion, if done too often, may divert resources which would otherwise have gone into growing the brain. This applies only in the very early years when that growth is rapid.
The other is parents using TV to pacify children instead of helping them and paying attention to their problems.
The one thing we know about young kids is that in spite of our tendency to treat them like delicate petals they are actually incredibly robust and the idea that 30 minutes of well chosen television in a day can be so harmful that it outweighs the benefit of the tremendous relief it may give a parent to have this small amount of time to do other tasks - or god forbid, relax for a few minutes - seems crazy to me.
There are an awful lot of things in a modern house that are TV-like (big bright screen, moving images, sound) so is watching moving video on a computer or tablet screen better or worse than the same amount of TV?
Do the negative effects end the moment you can interact with what's on screen? How much do you have to interact with what's on screen, is there a threshold?
The way it's getting I could imagine people getting all cargo-cult with this thinking, eschewing their TV's & plonking their kids in front of the computer (to watch the same content) instead.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/10/infant-tv-guidelin...
a. TV (and other one-way information sources) is really bad for babies/toddlers who need two-way interaction with the world.
b. for older kids(~4y+) replacing regular TV channels with dedicated documentary/learning videos in reasonable quantities is beneficial.
I'm quite curious on how virtual interactions(ipad/etc) affect child development, any research links?
edit: just sneaking a few minutes on HN while she watches Nihongo Quick Lesson on NHK (via Roku). Only a few shows actually really engage her, but this is one of them... She shouts and dances with the Mime guy for example.
I think as with most things, the key is moderation, and a couple of hours of TV seems unlikely to do substantive harm in the context of a day that involves lots of play in the nursery, lots of reading with daddy and mummy, running about in the yard for an hour etc.
No one is really sure why this is the case, but it is very well proven. (It's called the video deficit, even when you're just talking about audio.)
If this weren't the case then you would be able to teach your kids the phonemes of other languages just by playing audio tapes of native speakers for them, but unfortunately this doesn't work so if you actually want your kids to be bilingual then you need to sign them up for an exchange for age one.
Not only do they know what they are seeing on the TV, regularly talking about various stars of the channel, such as Nina and Star, but the 1.5 y/o can even ask for the channel by name "I want sprout", and the 2.5 y/o can additionally even work the remote to get it, and say the numbers "1","1","9" as he's pushing them. Finally, my 1.5 y/o is already addicted to books and will page through them when there is a commercial or something she's not interested in.
They both learn a ton watching sprout. My 1.5y/o does dances and things that she sees, as well as says things I know she never learned from us.
We also have a large selection of YouTube playlists of childrens songs, age appropriate cartoons, and slightly non-age appropriate cartoons like 1940's vintage Micky Mouse cartoons. Again, they both ask for the playlist they want "I want Micky", "I want Dragon", "I want Caillou", etc.
Kids learn by observing the world around them. When I was a kid, I was watching my parents work a cattle ranch. My kids are often stuck in the house for five or six hours at a time, because I don't have a cattle ranch. They've explored every room, cabinet, jar, and canister that they have access too, and their huge collection of books hold no mysteries for them. You can only sit and try to read for so long, before you're sick of it for awhile, and they know all the pictures and can correctly tell you every animal, vegetable, vehicle, and geographical feature those books contain. What they see on the TV and computer supplements their learning opportunities.
Based on my experiences, I have to call bullshit on this politically correct article, and those like it.
"A nationally representative study from the 1990s found that only 17 percent of children under one were watching television and fewer than half of children between the ages of one and two watched. In a 2006 study of 1,009 parents, 40 percent of babies were watching TV or DVDs/videos by three months; the average baby started watching videos at six months and regular television at ten months." Source: Parenting, Inc., p. 142
"Knowing that television viewing by children under the age of three is associated with reduced reading scores on tests that measure reading recognition, reading comprehension, and memory makes these statistics all the more alarming. Surveys show that children six and under spend three times more time in front of a TV, computer, or video game each day than they do reading." (p. 143)
Today [2008], a Baby Einstein DVD retails for $19.99, and those aimed at children under two account for $1 billion in sales." (p. 120)
"In a 2004 survey by the nonprofit Zero to Three, 82 percent of parents were comfortable or very comfortable with children under two watching television, and 89 percent were satisfied with the quality of available videos. By the age of twenty-four months, 90 percent of babies are regularly watching TV, DVDs, and videos for an average of an hour and a half per day. When asked in a nationwide study why they exposed their babies to media under the age of two, despite explicit warnings against it from the medical profession, parents said 'education.'" (p. 126)
"A 2005 study of 1,000 children published in Archives of Pediatrics found that children who watch TV before age three have lower cognitive scores at age seven." (p. 131) "For each additional hour of daily TV viewing before age three, the chances of having attentional problems increased 10 percent; a child who watched two hours a day on average was 20 percent more likely to have attention problems." (p. 131)
"Studies show that high levels of television viewing before age three are associated with subsequent bullying, and impaired reading and mathematical proficiency. A 2006 study in Pediatrics found that the more television children under five watch, the less likely they are to engage in creative play." (p. 130)
"According to Dimitri Christakis, the director of the Child Health Institute at the University of Washington, overstimulation is damaging to the developing mind. The brain's orienting reflex, first described by Ivan Pavlov (of the famous dog), is triggered when a baby hears a strange sight or sound: He can't help but focus. Rapidly changing colors, sounds, and motions force a baby's brain to stay at attention. Each time her gaze might wander, action rivets her mind back to the screen. [...] Parents say, 'My child can't stop looking at it! She Loves it!' Christakis said. 'Well, true, she can't stop looking at it, but that does not mean she loves it.'"
"A 2007 study by Christakis, Meltzoff, and their colleague Frederick Zimmerman found that for every hour per day spent watching baby DVDs and videos, infants understand an average of six to eight fewer words than infants who did not watch them. Not surprisingly, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no television viewing before age two-- a fact of which only 6 percent of parents are aware, even though the warning was established in 1999." (p. 132)
"While certain types of media exposure can be beneficial to three- and four-year-olds--the best example is Sesame Street, which has been shown in reliable studies to help some preschoolers with learning skills--there is no evidence that exposure before that age is a good idea and plenty to suggest that it's harmful. In fact, watching even Sesame Street before age two is associated with delayed language..." (p. 133)
"In an experiment conducted by a Georgetown University researcher, parents were explicitly told that videos were to be shown to their babies in order to determine whether or not babies could learn from TV and videos. Many of the parents then told the researcher that they had already read research supporter the videos' educational value. But they couldn't possibly have done so--no such research exists. Parents have clearly absorbed the advertising and marketing messages implying educational value and assumed there was proof behind the promises. One thirty-three-year-old stay-at-home mom told me she tried to get her son to watch educational television, but he just didn't seem interested, and she would try out Baby Einstein DVDs instead if they weren't so expensive. 'I Personally think it helps them with speech, learning to say words, and the alphabet,' she said." (p. 134)
"Patricia Kuhl, who studies language acquisition at the University of Washington, conducted an experiment in which a native Mandarin speaker played with a group of babies for an hour a day while speaking Chinese. Through laboratory testing, she found that babies were subsequently able to recognize Mandarin sounds. But not one of the three control groups-- a set of babies who saw the Chinese speaker play with babies on a video, another group who listened to an audio recording of the Chinese woman playing, and a third group who had no exposure to the Chinese speaker-- were able to distinguish Mandarin sounds from English ones. It turns out that in order for a baby to learn a foreign language, a foreign-language-speaking human being needs to be present." (p. 122)
"In one study of two-and-a-half-year-olds, it took six viewings of a video to accomplish what a single live demonstration could do with simple-step operations like removing a mitten or playing with a puppet, a gap that has come to be known as the video deficit. Research has also suggested that while children can learn new words from watching TV, videos are less effective than live experiences, particularly for viewers under two." (p. 131)
"A 2005 study in American Behavioral Scientist concluded, 'Although the experimental studies are still few, they are remarkably consistent in indicating a video deficit for children 24 months and younger. Although there is some learning indicated by some of the studies, the learning is dramatically less than found for equivalent live displays.'" (p. 124)
When you first hear that it sounds like TV can reduce your years on earth.
When they took a close look though they found a confounding variable; health care.
Those who watched more TV tended to be poorer, and thus had less healthcare. It's possible that the same thing is happening in this group of research as well.
In this case we already know that the most important mediating variables for predicting outcomes on the relevant measures are parent-child talk and self-directed play, so it's very easy to see how each hour of watching TV causes increasing damage. I'm sure some of the gap is because of mere correlation, but it's also clear that TV watching itself is a huge part of the problem if only because it prevents the child from getting the types of interactions they need for their brains to develop properly. (whether or not the TV itself fries their dopamine system or whatever directly is still an open question.)
Like it seems as if TV is being specially berated when it could really be anything that takes time away from interacting with your child that is bad.
The reason TV is being singled out specifically is because it's basically causing permanent brain damage in 90+% of kids. Sure, there are other ways of fucking up your kids as well, but in terms of what people are actually doing TV is at or near the top of the list.
All these people who think it's ok to let their kids watch 'just an hour' of TV per day are probably why ADHD now effects over 9% of kids.
Personally I thin it is OBVIOUS that TV is damaging children since it is unnatural the same way sugar is. The kids of our ancestors have been crawling around on the floor exploring and playing for millions of years - sitting in front of flickering lights for hours on end for just 30 years.
Vaccines then. Clothes. Shoes.
Want more examples of "unnatural" things?
The point is to equate something being "unnatural", whatever that is supposed to mean, with it being "OBVIOUSLY bad" is so inane that I really do hope you're either a troll or just plain did not think through what you wrote.
It is supposed to mean huge changes from the relatively stable environment present during human evolution. The environment we are adapted to operating in. Unless you are a creationist, that should be pretty obvious.
Maybe these researchers are Skinnerian behaviorists who think the kids are just exhibiting behavior.
Unlike school-age children, infants and toddlers “just have no idea what’s going on” no matter how well done a video is, Dr. Troseth said.
How old are your kids?
The article also mentions specifically that once kids are over 3, they can learn from some TV -- Sesame Street specifically has been the subject of lots of studies, and shows some benefits, though it still can't compare with learning from actual people.
That's the main takeaway -- for kids under 2, it's actively harmful; for kids over two, it's not as bad, but kids will still be better off if it's possible to spend those hours interacting with people or playing (by themselves, with others, anything).
This comment is quite strange...
Computers screens are more often than not the delivery vector for your daily dose of passive consumption. And it's not just the desktop machines either, it's the iPads and the phones that happily join in.
Even not having a TV no longer means that you are immunized against this, and being without internet access is far worse than not having cable.
For one the internet is far more addictive in many ways (think minecraft, the various role playing games and social websites) and besides that it has so many legitimate uses that one could easily burn up a whole day without ever leaving the comfy chair in front of the big tft in consumptive mode without so much as a glance at the television.
“I like to call it secondhand TV,” said Dr. Brown... Studies cited in the guidelines say that parents interact less with children when the television is on, and that a young child at play will glance at the TV — if it is on, even in the background — three times a minute.
I disagree. You can leave TV on and have an uninterrupted stream of content, images, sound, noise constantly delivered to you with zero effort. Not so with Netflix or Youtube.
You can't "leave Netflix on" because at the end of the program it will just stop and wait for you to choose another one. That alone makes a huge difference (to say nothing of the absence of advertising).
For me, TV refers to the device itself, not to programming. My son only watches content from Netflix and PBS Kids (the latter does have brief sponsor messages).
That's just plain false. The content does matter between ages 3 and 5, but before age two the content is irrelevant because of the video deficit.
The only thing that might make a difference is how many times the camera angle changes per minute, but other than that there shouldn't be any difference between content made for adults and content made for kids.
“As always, the children who are most at risk are exactly
the very many children in our society who have the fewest
resources,” Alison Gopnik, a psychologist at the
University of California, said in an e-mail.
Parents who read a lot to their children have children who grow up to be more verbal. But parents who read a lot to their children also tend to pass on genes for verbal fluency. Studies that adequately control for genes show that reading to children does virtually nothing for their verbal ability—it's all in the genes, and in random events over which the parents have no control. See http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_chalks_it_up_to_the_b... and http://www.amazon.com/Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial-Nature/dp/01... for more.
Apparently, at that age the biggest problem is that kids can't pick up language and speech by watching videos.
Going with no TV is noble, good for you. But going from heavy use to no use is not necessarily the reason your child is doing so good. There is a balance is that balance is unique to each child.
But you say: "There is a balance is that balance is unique to each child."
How do you know that there "is a balance unique to each child"? Do you have studies to backup your assertion similar to those cited in the article?
Live theater allows the user to control what to focus on during each scene. If there is a conversation, we can choose who the "camera" is pointing at. We are also looking at real human beings interacting with each other. The experience is mildly interactive.
Passive screen-based media gives us neither set of choices.
By the way, I'm not arguing that TV is good for kids. I'm just trying to analyze the argument in favor of preventing infants from watching passive screen media.
A remote doesn't explore causality inside the media, it's only exploring "when I press a certain button it will switch to a different show which is not of my choosing and which I can't predict". They might correllate pressing the same numbers with the same show at the same time of the day. The "camera angle" interactivity in live theater doesn't get into causality at all, just different ways you can look at or listen to a scene, but in videogames causality is rarely so random.
Think of it at a very basic, I-don't-know-what-TV-or-videogames-are level: I press the channel up button on the remote, the image suddenly changes to something entirely different. If I do this a few hours later, the former image and the latter image are entirely different from before. Let's even assume I'm watching Netflix and I've figured out how to navigate menus: the menu is interactive, but the media I'm watching doesn't give me any control over what's happening inside the media. In a videogame, if I press a button a character will move, a gun will shoot, a menu will open. If I do the same thing a few hours from now, the same thing will happen. A different thing might happen in a predictable context: if my dude is in front of a wall he might climb the wall rather than jump when I press A, it's generally bad design to allow otherwise. The link between cause and effect is much more clear, and my role as an agent of cause is much more clear as well.