Research into autism is always going to be complicated by the fact that ethically, you can’t really make one group of children engage in a behavior that’s suspected to cause autism while you keep another group of children from engaging in that behavior (which would be a true random assignment design). So, there are complications in the results of studies about the relationship between TV and autism.
This study (Chonchaiya, W., Nuntnarumit, P., & Pruksananonda, C. (2011). Comparison of television viewing between children with autism spectrum disorder and controls. Acta Paediatrica, 100(7), 1033-1037. doi:10.1111/j.1651-2227.2011.02166.x) states that children with autism watch TV earlier, more, and watch more adult shows than children without autism. However, you could make the argument that the TV watching is a result of, rather than a cause of, autism, since this result is correlational only.
Waldman proposed in 2006 that a small correlation between rates of autism and counties with more rainfall in the Northwest meant that it was possible that the autism was caused by pollutants in the rain, or by the children having to stay in more and thus be more exposed to TV. He used no controls for this. It’s important to note that Waldman claimed that his child was diagnosed with autism at 3, and was later found to have no autism symptoms.
There is some inconsistent data that correlates TV before 2 with attention problems at 7, but there are some methodological flaws with those studies.
Please make sure that your baby learns to cross crawl: Moving the right arm forward at the same time as the left knee is brought forward and moving the left arm forward at the same time that the right knee is brought forward. Human development studies have long ago shown that there is sometimes a connection between learning to cross crawl and dyslexia. (I learned this from the Human Development Laboratory at Peabody of Vanderbilt.)
Babies need to spend a lot of time out of play pens and baby beds. It can affect their senses of balance and even their vision.
I’ve heard this one before (often asked by parents anxious because their child skipped crawling and went directly to walking, or became, the horror, a butt-scooter rather than crawling) and once tried very hard to track down where this claim actually started (because there are actually no such human development studies that associate cross crawling and dyslexia).
Well, it would help if you understood the basics of what you are talking about. There is a difference between flicker, frame rate and whatever the industrial term is for the rate of content change.
Unfortunately, what you are saying doesn’t make sense technically. “Frame rate change” as a term doesn’t exist. “Frame rate” does, and it’s specified by engineers, and hardly takes “scientists” to measure. You may be talking about how fast the content of the screen changes, but that is neither “frame rate” or “flicker,” so as someone in the video business, I’m not at all what you are referring to.
I can answer questions about flicker (which actually has decreased with progressive TV scan rates)and frame rates, which are defined standards, but I have no idea what you are trying to say. Simply saying that “scientists” are involved is utterly and completely meaningless without further explanation.
Standard NTSC frame rates are 59.94 Hz, (B&W was 60 Hz, but they need to take bandwidth out for color processing) but with alternating fields, so it was close to 30 fields per second. PAL, the standard used in most of Europe is 50 Hz, which would produce more flicker. HDTV is 60 Hz. Movies are only 24 fps, and has greater flicker.
However, you could quadruple the frame rate to 240 Hz and if you are showing still images, then your baby is going to be bored in a few seconds, so frame rate means shit, even if a scientist herself measures it.
Since this is in IMHO now–I’d like to echo, all things in moderation. Your baby does need as much time as you can give her to play with real objects and interact with real people. However, you as a parent also have rights. If you are alone with the baby all day and she doesn’t nap much (like mine), then some Sesame Street may be your ticket to sanity, and that’s all right. There are two things you can’t do and NO ONE can do:
Protect your baby from every single thing that might detract from her Best Odds, and
Be a Super Parent whom no one can criticize.
Pick your failings and keep yourself sane; minimize the stuff you know isn’t ideal. And then stop feeling guilty.
English is not my first language, and I esp. don’t always know the correct scientific term.
I was referring to the rate of content change - how many seconds or minutes does the child have time to process an image on the screen before a new one appears? And that has gotten faster compared to previous decades, and does affect children’s ability to identifiy pictures or things.
Yes, that is what I meant. It’s not a purely technical problem of the frequency of the signal (like in old PC monitors flickering at the wrong frequency causing eye-strain and headaches, that was solved with better, newer monitors), but a question of the content that has accelerated because the MTV generation gets bored more easily, and it filters down even to children’s programming.
The scientists involved were child development psychologists, doctors and or neurologists.
How do you know your baby is bored by a still image? It’s part of developing their neuronic system. Babies like to look at the same picture book over and over again without getting bored. Toddlers (above age 3) like to watch the same Disney movie over and over again, listen to the same music cassette or sing the same song (driving adults crazy with it is only a bonus). Partly it’s that repetition is re-assuring, considering how much new stuff they encounter each day, but part is also learning to completly know the stuff.
Hmmm… my oldest didn’t just skip crawling, she went straight to running. She now has a 4.6 GPA, and committed as a sophomore in HS to play NCAA D1 sports. My youngest crawled quite a bit… he was diagnosed as dyslexic/dysgraphic at about 8 years old. A lot of hard work was involved, but he is currently a 3.8 GPA student so it isn’t the end of the world.
All three of my kids are very good students and athletes, and we never set a limit on their TV viewing. It is pretty much always on in the background of our house.
Crawling is NOT a milestone, plenty of babies never do it, and I’ve read all the standard parenting books (What to Expect, Spock, Sears, Leech) and all of them stress the complete unimportance of how a baby locomotes. They should have the opportunity to explore (in whatever manner suits them) but it doesn’t matter how they do it, or if they don’t do it at all until they walk.
Quoted for truth. My daughter didn’t crawl until after she learned to cruise. She wanted to be on her feet, like her big brother. We were worried about her, but as soon as she had the strength, she found a way to get around. Plus, my son used to leapfrog instead of crawl. He’d start on his knees, rock back and forth, then spring forward. Eventually he got the hang of crawling, but that was one of his favorite forms of locomotion for a long time.
As long as the kid has the desire to get around, the opportunity and eventually develops the means to do it, it doesn’t matter if they hit crawling or not.
This is the nice thing about google, it’s pretty easy to find out if you are using the wrong terminology.
My toddlers are my cites.
How do I know if a baby is bored? That’s not a difficult question to answer, so I’ll ask if you have or have had babies? Have you ever seen a baby stare at a non-moving still image for very long? How long is the longest you’ve seen?
For both of my kids when they were at about the seven month period, a still image on the TV (which was the point I was addressing) or a picture on the wall (which would be the equivalent), may interest them for anywhere between 0.5 seconds and a couple of minutes or longer, depending on the colors, particular image, and if they are allowed to tap or touch the TV/picture, which will increase the time they are interested, but a simple still image will eventually bore infants. Books, which are held in the hands and the “contents” or pages are a completely different category.
This discussion does not concern older toddlers, so that part of your post is completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand. We specifically are talking about seven month old babies, and their reactions to watching TV, if we can get back to the discussion.
There are DVDs and showed designs for children which have content that doesn’t rapidly transition between different scenes, and I still don’t think it’s particularly good. Like my friend said, it’s like white bread. Fine, but not that nutritious. OK in small quantities, but you don’t want to raise your babies on just that.
The question if hours of TV is too much for a seven month old baby really depends on a couple of factors. For us, since we both work and the kids are in daycare for 7 to eight hours, then two hours of TV would be insane. It would be sucking up all the free available time. We just don’t have the TV on during the week days.
For a seven month old, who will be sleeping 10 to 14 hours (including naps) per day, leaving between 10 to 14 hours of awake time. Assume that feeding, bathing and changing will take two to three hours, you are between seven and 12 hours of play and other time. Babies require down time, often which they like to be held or carried, so the amount of “play” time is less, and two hours every day just seems way too much for me.
This makes me think not only of the well established association of larger amounts of early electronic entertainment with obesity, but further on the analogy:
Part of the cause of obesity in the Western world (including childhood obesity) is the availability of what could be thought of as supernormal stimuli. High calorie sweet salty and fatty foods strongly trigger our award centers. This served us well for most of our evolutionary history but current food choices are not like what we had over most of our evolutionary history.
Television to infants is another supernormal stimulus. The infant behavior to attend to faces and and changing (novel) images has been strongly selected for over the evolutionary time scale. In general the attending to such a stimulus would result in attending to the faces of family members, a key foundation for a host of other developmental accomplishments. Television with its rapid scene transitions is an abnormal and potent stimulus for that attention …
I’m not going to spend even more time by googling for information since you aren’t going to believe me anyway.
Ah okay. Your personal anecdote of course trumps findings by scientists.
How many babies would I need to trump yours?
There is a discussion? I thought it was sharing of anecdotes on how it isn’t harmful because nothing happened…
And that has to do with watching TV …?
Neurologically, there are no factors, there are simply studies that it’s bad. But since your toddlers are your cite, other factors obviously come into play.
Yes, and in the US, the parents rights trump children’s rights.
In other countries, the rights of the children come first.
So everybody here is a single parent without any relatives or neighbours to watch the child? And without a playpen to put the child for the 15 min when you need to go to the toilet?
Really strange that people managed to raise babies before TV.
Wonderful fallacy of excluded middle: because you can’t be a super parent, don’t even try to do what’s best for your child. Just don’t feel guilty that you have no other choice than to park the kid in front of the TV, then you don’t have to bother with alternatives or effects.
Thanks - I knew that babies perceive TV differently to adults, but couldn’t phrase it properly, so you’ve saved me the effort.
TBH, I’d be surprised i many 7-month-olds were willing to sit and watch 2 hours of TV per day, unless their parent’s sitting with them and there’s lots of interaction (clapping along with songs, etc). Watching a football game with an involved parent, watching TV or very short bursts, they’re all fine. But from the OP it sounded more like sitting a kid in front of a TV pretty much alone.
Most babies I’ve known would either fall asleep or get grumpy and cry for attention or, if they’re mobile, wander off and do something more interesting. TBH, I’d be a little concerned if a kid that age were happy to sit staring blankly at a screen for that length of time.
I’ll have to agree with you here. I have no idea what kind of fight s/he wants, either.
Thanks DSeid for the quote about supernormal stimuli. The book seems interesting.
I have to agree with SciFiSam, that I don’t know any seven-month olds who would watch two hours of tv a day as a substitute for human interaction. I can only imagine it would be an environment which is sorely lacking in stimulation or human interaction.
Well you were being pretty obtuse by not acknowledging what she meant by frame rate. Especially if you work in the industry you should be used to people not knowing technical terms. That was annoying.
Since it’s technical, normally, I don’t give people shit for it, but s/he was going out her her/his was to claim “scientists” backing without any cites or even any sort of real explanation of whatever he/she was talking about. Simply throwing in the word “scientist” to win an argument is stupid. There are plenty of scientist who are clearly wrong, for one thing, but just simply saying that “my position is better because ‘scientists’ agree” is bullshit. So, I’ll give him/her shit for using the wrong terminology. If you are going to claim an authoritative argument, then back it up. If you are going to pretend you know something you have no fucking clue about, then someone is going to call you on it, and I’m calling him\her on it.
It’s not obtuse. I fucking well know what I’m doing, which is calling bullshit on stupidity when I see it.
But aren’t those two separate things? You could have just said Cite and it would have been effective in pointing out she was not supporting her argument sufficiently.
Going on about frame rates and flicker when you clearly knew what she meant served no purpose but to make the argument difficult to follow.