Comments (5)

By Mom Unplugged, February 13, 2008 3:44 pm

CJ of Resources 4 Home-Education (a great blog by the way with lots of links to educational resources!) left me a comment today with a very interesting link. The link is to a Reuters article entitled: Psychologist Warns of Educational Television Myth. Thank you CJ!

Psychologist Dr. Aric Sigman, author of Remotely Controlled: How Television is Damaging Our Lives is waging a battle against so-called educational television for children, what he calls “recreational junk food.” According to Dr. Sigman, the brains of young children who are exposed to screen time (be it TV, computers or DVD/video) are physically developing in a less healthy way despite any actual learning that might occur as a result of this screen exposure.

He says: “There is a definite inverse relationship between time spent watching any kind of television or screen when you are young and your ability to read and concentrate when you are older.”

He believes that the sensory complexity of TV, video and computer games (rapidly changing images, colors, noises, etc.) is having a detrimental effect on the wiring of the child’s brain and is producing children with shorter attention spans. This claim is backed up by a study that I wrote about here: Children’s Behavioral Problems Linked to TV.

Dr. Sigman also says:

Studies of brain activity have shown that a child doing simple mental arithmetic with coloured counters or beans has greater blood flow to the brain than one engaged what may look like a far more complex computer game… It may well be that your child learns from the TV that a certain country is in Africa, but that may well also come at the cost of doing something to their attention span…(w)hereas if a parent is talking to their children about geography or nature, they can learn without that risk and will physically exercise their brains in the process.

Do Dr. Sigman’s kids watch TV? “My children have candy sometimes, and television is just like candy, it’s recreational junk food…(b)ut it’s a complete myth that children somehow inherently need TV — otherwise they would be born with a television built into their stomachs, just like the Tellytubbies”.

Yet again, the old adage “all things in moderation” seems to be good advice!

Comments (9)

By Mom Unplugged, November 19, 2007 11:25 pm

Tonight I heard on NPR’s All Things Considered an interesting story that fits right in with Unplug Your Kids so I absolutely have to report it for those who might have missed it. Sorry to postpone my next Christmas/Holiday Unplugged post for anyone who really cares, but I’ll get it up tomorrow morning or evening.

The National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) has just released today, a new study on the reading habits of Americans: children, teens, and adults. Here are some of the findings:

++ Americans are reading less - teens and young adults read less often and for shorter amounts of time compared with other age groups and with Americans of previous years

- Less than one-third of 13-year-olds are daily readers, a 14 percent decline from 20 years earlier.

- Among 17-year-olds, the percentage of non-readers doubled over a 20-year period, from nine percent in 1984 to 19 percent in 2004.

- On average, Americans ages 15 to 24 spend almost two hours a day watching TV, and only seven minutes of their daily leisure time on reading.

++ Americans are reading less well – reading scores continue to worsen, especially among teenagers and young males. By contrast, the average reading score of 9-year-olds has improved.

- Reading scores for 12th-grade readers fell significantly from 1992 to 2005, with the sharpest declines among lower-level readers.

- 2005 reading scores for male 12th-graders are 13 points lower than for female 12th-graders, and that gender gap has widened since 1992.

- Reading scores for American adults of almost all education levels have deteriorated, notably among the best-educated groups. From 1992 to 2003, the percentage of adults with graduate school experience who were rated proficient in prose reading dropped by 10 points, a 20 percent rate of decline.

According to NPR, an earlier NEA study was criticized for only considering adults reading literary works, fiction, poetry, and drama. This time the study also included all ages, and all reading materials, including newspapers, magazines, and even the internet. The results were the same.

There seems to be a decline in pleasure reading beginning in middle school and continuing on through high school and adulthood. People read less and less…and therefore, read less and less well. This affects academic and economic performance, as well as civic and political contributions.

Of course the obvious culprits appear to be electronic distractions, however some speak of a positive “New Literacy” among today’s youth, “a literacy not limited to books.” Dana Joya, Chairman of the NEA debunks this claim. Apparently all the kids tested engaged in the same sort of electronic activities, but those who READ BOOKS, did better on the tests.

Other interesting stats from the study :

55% who read below “the basic level,” were unemployed.

Only 3% of prison inmates are proficient readers.

(and I have to say I have not read the complete study so as to be able to exactly define the terms “basic level” and “proficient,” but at least this gives you a general idea).

The final tidbit that caught my attention from this report was that the NEA found that socio-economic status did not have an impact on the amount that children read, rather the defining characteristic, was the number of books in the home.

Links:

NPR story: Reading Study Shows Remarkable Decline in US

NEA: 11/19/07 New Reading Study Summary (and link to download full report)

Photo courtesy of morguefile.com and photographer jeltovski

Comments (6)

By Mom Unplugged, October 9, 2007 8:55 pm

There is a new study out which finds that children who watch TV for two or more hours per day from a young age (2.5 years-old), are more prone to behavioral problems and poor social skills when they are older (5.5 years-old).
The study was conducted by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, and was published in the October issue of the journal Pediatrics. It is based on a nationwide survey of the parents of 2,707 children.

Here are some of the findings:

-Children who had been sustained, heavy (two or more hours of TV a day) TV watchers from ages 2.5 to 5.5 had problems in the areas of social skills and behavior. Problems with aggression and difficulty paying attention were also commonly found in this group.

-Children who didn’t watch much as toddlers, but who were heavy viewers by age 5.5 demonstrated problems with social skills.

-Children who watched TV heavily at age 2.5 but who had reduced their TV viewing time by age 5.5, showed no significant social or behavioral problems.

I think that the last point is one of the most interesting findings in this study. Even if a child was a heavy viewer as a toddler, as long as viewing is significantly reduced by age 5.5, then the negative behavioral and social effects seem to be alleviated. In other words, preschool and kindergarten age is still not too late to reduce a child’s TV viewing and see improved behavior. Reducing or eliminating the TV, even after the toddler years, can have a positive impact on behavior and social skills.

Today’s Phoenix newspaper (The Arizona Republic) had an article about the study, that added a few bits of interesting information. The Arizona Republic reporter interviewed Jill Stamm, a psychologist and co-founder of New Directions Institute for Infant Brain Development in Phoenix. According to Ms. Stamm, TV’s short bursts of programming and commercials trains an infant’s brain to “scan and shift” rather than to pay attention for a long period of time. Once this brain pattern is set, it can inhibit the ability to learn later in life. She says: “What the brain gets wired for is quick hits of salient information. The brain gets used to that, and that’s what it wants.” Ms. Stamm says that the brain is adaptable and by reducing or ceasing TV viewing altogether, particularly before the age of 5, the brain will rewire itself and repair the damage.

There is also mention of a former Phoenix school teacher who says she could pick out the heavy TV viewers in her class simply by their behavior. They were the kids who couldn’t sit still and had short attention spans. She also said that “their vocabularies were limited and their writing less descriptive.”

Additionally, the study gaged the effects on 5.5 year-old children of having a television in the bedroom. 41% of the parents surveyed reported that their child had a TV in their room. Not surprisingly, the study found that having a set in the bedroom was linked to sleep problems.

LINKS:

Read the summary of the study at the Pediatrics website, here.

The Arizona Republic Article: TV Bad for Kids, New Study Reports

Comments (3)

By Mom Unplugged, September 26, 2007 10:26 am

I haven’t written directly about TV and kids in a while, but this morning I happened to stumble upon this interesting recent study published in the May 2007 Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, entitled Television and DVD/Video Viewing in Children Younger Than 2 Years.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children under age 2 years, watch no TV. But how much TV are children under 24 months really watching? This study attempts to answer that question.

The findings:

- By 3 months of age, about 40% of children regularly watched TV, DVDs or videos.

- By 24 months of age, 90% of children regularly watched TV, DVDs, or videos.

- The median age at which regular media exposure was introduced was 9 months.

- Average viewing time per day for children less than 1 year: 1 hour

- Average viewing time per day for children ages 1 to 2: more than 1.5 hours

- Parents watched with their children more than half the time, but only 32% watched with their child every time.

- Most common reasons for media exposure in children less than 2: education, entertainment, babysitting.

Conclusions:

“Parents should be urged to make educated choices about their children’s media exposure. Parental hopes for the educational potential of television can be supported by encouraging those parents who are already allowing screen time to watch with their children.”

(Study was based on a telephone survey of 1,009 parents of children ages 2 months - 24 months, and was conducted by Frederick J. Zimmerman, PhD; Dimitri A. Christakis, MD, MPH; and Andrew N. Meltzoff, PhD.)

You can read the brief summary here, and the full article (which provides much more detail) here.

Comments (4)

By Mom Unplugged, August 13, 2007 11:00 am

This is old news now (about one week old) but I MUST blog about it. A study by Dr. Thomas Robinson, the director of the Center for Healthy Weight at Packard Children’s Hospital and associate professor of pediatrics and of medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine has found that children ages 3 to 5 tend to prefer the taste of food that comes in a McDonald’s wrapper over identical food which does not.

Dr. Robinson’s research team gave 63 children, ages 3 to 5, the following foods: chicken nuggets, a hamburger, french fries (all from McDonald’s) as well as baby carrots and milk (from the grocery store). Each child received two portions of each food. One portion was wrapped in a McDonald’s wrapper or bag, the other was in a plain wrapper. The children overwhelmingly preferred the food in the McDonald’s wrapper over the identical food in the plain wrapper.

Dr. Robinson says:

“Kids don’t just ask for food from McDonald’s, they actually believe that the chicken nugget they think is from McDonald’s tastes better than an identical, unbranded nugget.”

Other interesting (and frightening) findings of the study are the following facts about the children:

- One third of the children ate at McDonald’s more than once a week.

- More than three-quarters had McDonald’s toys at home

- They had an average of 2.4 televisions in their homes

- More than one-half the children had a TV in their rooms! (Wow! These kids are only 3 to 5 years-old!!!)

Discussing his findings, which seem to link TV-viewing with a preference for McDonald’s, Dr. Robinson said:

“We found that kids with more TVs in their homes and those who eat at McDonald’s more frequently were even more likely to prefer the food in the McDonald’s wrapper. This is a company that knows what they’re doing. Nobody else spends as much to advertise their fast-food products to children.”

This frightening placebo effect of food preference in children seems to me to be yet another argument in favor of placing some sort of limit on food marketing to kids. If you want to read a bit more about about recent efforts to put limits on food ads targeted to kids, please read my June 25th post Food Marketing to Kids.

So, in case anyone still had a doubt, kids as young as ages 3 to 5 can be successfully “branded” by large corporations spending billions on TV advertising targeted at young viewers.

OK. On a lighter note, I think I’d better stock up on McDonald’s wrappers for a proper presentation of my A-list brussels sprouts to my children. “Hey kids, did you know McDonald’s now serves brussels sprouts? Yum!!!!!”

The study: Effects of Fast Food Branding on Young Children’s Taste Preferences appearing in the Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medecine, Vol. 161 No. 8, August 2007

(You can read an article about the study at the Washington Post online: Foods Taste Better With McDonald’s Logo, Kids Say.)

Thanks to morguefile.com and photographer spress for the “Good Food” photo.