This week a couple of studies came out concerning young children and television. The first is a study led by Dr. Frederick J. Zimmerman of the University of Washington that will be published in JAMA. Zimmerman surveyed parents regarding how much and what type of programming children watched from birth through 24 months. The second study was authored by Elizabeth Vandewater of the University of Texas in Austin and surveyed parents of children up through age 6.
I'm a parent of a 3-year-old and an 18-month-old. We are strong believers in the maxim "all things in moderation." We are not rabidly anti-TV, but we also are not laissez-faire about letting our kids watch anything that's on. Our kids only watch Noggin and PBS Kids on TV; and classic Disney films, Sesame Street and Electric Company on DVD. That's pretty much it. Once in a while I'll watch a sports program on a weekend afternoon with them in the room, but they never see adult programming like CSI or Law & Order or even the news.
Becoming a no-TV household seems vaguely attractive, but think how much TV programming is a part of our body of cultural knowledge. References to TV shows old and new come up in my conversations many times a day. It seems like isolating one's children from that body of "knowledge" would handicap them when it comes to relating to other kids. Personally, I learn an immense amount from watching TV. Not everything I watch, obviously, but definitely from Nova, Frontline and many programs on the Discovery and History channels, for example.
Having said that, however, I have to admit that the zombie state our kids get in while watching TV is disturbing. My 3-year-old gets so entranced that I literally have to stand between her and screen to get her attention, and even then it takes a few seconds for the trance to be broken.
It turns out we're pretty damn average according to the results of the Zimmerman study as reported in Science Daily:
The average amount of viewing time for the children was 40.2 minutes per day. At 3 months of age children watched less than an hour per day and by 24 months they watched more than 1.5 hours per day. "Approximately half of the viewing was of shows that parents reported to be in the children's educational category," the authors note. "The remaining half was approximately equally split among children's non-educational content, baby DVDs/videos and grown-up television."
The Vandewater study, however, (as reported in the Washington Post) is far more disturbing:
...as many as one in five youngsters under 2 even have a television placed in their bedrooms. More than half (54 percent) of these tiny tots could turn on the TV themselves...
...Most often, parents interviewed in the study said they put a TV set in their kid's room because it freed up other TVs in the house for parental use...
The percentage of older children with TVs in their bedrooms is even higher. To me, putting TV in a child's bedroom is obviously a bad thing. Children are very clever. It won't take them long to learn how to turn the volume down so they can get away with watching TV at any hour of the night, forfeiting the sleep developing brains clearly require. I can guarantee that our children will not have a TV (or a computer, for that matter) in their room until they are out of high school.
When I was young, I always woke up very early - long before anyone else in the house. I would try to watch TV, but in that era most stations were off the air until 6:00 or 7:00 am, and even when they came on the air their programming was about as unattractive to a kid as could be. The local farm report is what I remember most. But today, who knows what one's child might tune into in the middle of the night. I doubt many of the parents who put a TV in their child's room take the time to program the channels to which the TV can be tuned.
Parenting is a whole other topic, but I think TVs in young children's bedrooms are part of a larger "parenting of convenience" trend. Many parents today don't want to have conflict with their children, so they acquiesce to pretty much whatever the child wants. As many have commented, these parents are raising a generation of narcissists who learn very few lessons about personal boundaries or responsibility. As the Love and Logic folks say, you can pay your dues (i.e. learn to set limits for your kids and deal with the temporary conflict that causes) early in your children's lives, or you can pay much higher dues when they are teenagers. To us the choice is obvious.
