What is educational TV? Christakis’ team looked at several shows, including Barney, Sesame Street, Winnie the Pooh, and Blue’s Clues. It stands to reason that these weren’t great parents-so maybe it was something about their parenting skills, and not the boob tube itself, that caused these kids to develop problems. This seems important: Some parents were letting their kids watch five or more hours of television a day.
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What’s more, it doesn’t look at what kids were watching-were children who watched “educational” TV less likely to develop problems than kids who watched MTV? Finally, the study can’t establish a causal relationship between TV viewing and attention problems. The study says nothing about whether watching a lot less television would be bad for your child, however. The authors say that for every three additional daily hours of television that a kid watches at age 1, his chance of developing attention problems by age 7 increases by 28 percent. On average, the 1,300 1-year-olds in the study watched 2.2 hours of television a day.
First, the Seattle study only tells you what happens to your kid if he watches lots of TV. Yet there are a few shortcomings with this study that make its findings difficult to apply to my life, and probably yours as well. An average baby spends 2 hours a day (about one-sixth of his waking hours) watching a screen, more time than he spends reading or being read to. A 2003 survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 68 percent of children under the age of 2 watch some kind of “screen media” in a typical day-and not a little of it, either. American parents, though, flagrantly ignore this advice. There aren’t any firm guidelines about non-TV screens like cell phones and computers, but the child-rearing establishment generally prefers old-school activities-reading, singing, playing with baby toys-to electronic devices. The American Academy of Pediatrics cites the same fear in its strong warning against television for children younger than 2 years old. Our pediatrician told us that on-screen images move too quickly for kids’ brains, and could thus cause long-term developmental problems. Baby books and child-rearing classes describe TV as a vice on the order of smoking or keeping firearms in the house. But if I sit his high chair in front of the TV, his resistance melts: He’ll accept whatever nuggets I offer and will barely even fuss when it’s something self-evidently nasty. He’s always been an insufferably picky eater-he’ll kick and scream and spit out much of the food we try to push into his mouth. (I was rebuffed.) And just before he turned 1 year old, I discovered that TV was an ideal way to distract him while feeding him dinner.
When he was about 6 months old, I began lobbying my wife to let him have an old laptop as a toy. When he got older, I’d give him my phone to calm him down in the car or at the supermarket. In his earliest days, I’d lay him on the couch in the morning and watch TV while he drifted off to sleep. The sight of an electronic device quiets him instantly, and if you hand him the gadget, it will reliably captivate him for 10 minutes or longer, far more time than he spends with any other kind of toy.Įver since he was born, I’ve taken advantage of this effect judiciously but regularly, usually to get out of a jam. Like all babies, Khalil goes gaga for any sort of screen. Also, no more iPhone, iPad, or computers. At my 1-year-old son Khalil’s doctor visit last month, our pediatrician told us to stop letting him watch TV.
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