> I'm convinced that watching TV is harmful to a child's intellectual development. (And there's an established body of evidence to support that.)

Is there? I dislike children being raised by television as much as the next guy, but the chapter in Freakonomics on child development says there's no correlation between children's test scores and the amount of television they watch, according to the data from ECLS (http://nces.ed.gov/ecls/).

(edited to correct typo)