My wife and I have talked about getting a new laptop computer for myself, and turning over my computer to our son. I was a bit hesitant at the idea of giving a four-year-old his own computer, but hearing how your three-year-old has her own computer has answered that. 
That’s the conclusion the news services reached, but that is not what the data shows.
Let’s consider how this study was done.
Were any kids tested? No.
Were any monitors put on TVs to keep track of hours watched? No.
Did psychologists analyze any subjects? No.
So how was the data gathered? The researchers asked parents to estimate how many hours each child spent in front of the TV, going back several years.
How accurate do your think this is? Can you remember exactly how many hours your 4-year-old spent in front of the TV two years ago? And would you want to reveal it to a researcher if you did (wouldn’t you be ashamed to admit it?)? And how valid would a parent’s observations be if asked to check a box: Is your child (1) active, (2) hyperactive, (3) normal?
So the data, gathered from questionaires only, showed that there was a correlation between a child’s activity as reported by a parent and the number of hours TV was watched, also reported by a parent. Even if the data could be remotely accurate, is this the only factor in a child’s development? Was data controlled for social/economic class, nutrition, parent’s education, etc.?
In short, this study is worthless and so are the conclusions. Parents, make up your own mind about what your children should watch.
If the kids aren’t computer literate they will be at a great disadvantage as they grow up. My husband is a software engineer and wants the kids fluent and comfortable with computers since they are everywhere now. I also think it will help them grow to be far more net savvy and capable of making better decisions online about who the person behind the screen name really is if we start having these discussions before the kids hit the rebellious hormone driven preteen years.
Interesting! 'Cause my husband is also a software engineer, and we are just the opposite. I mean, obviously we want our kids to be comfortable with computers. But we definitely feel that now is too soon, and we don’t have any kid software. Sometimes DDad and DGirl sit together while he plays old video games like Joust, and she likes typing on the word processor, but that’s it. She plays a game at the library every so often.
We figure that later on is quite soon enough. After all, none of us did a lot with computers before age 10 or so (when DDad started programming on his Atari 800) and it didn’t do us any noticeable harm. Besides, computers change and become simpler to use and new ideas pop up so fast–did fooling around with Apple IIe’s back then really prepare us for now, or could we have adjusted fine if we’d been deprived until PCjr’s 3 years later?
Mostly, though, we worry about things like injury to the hands and arms through improper mousing and the wrong size desk, etc. --when the DangerKids get a computer it will be one with the right size and adjustment of equipment. And too many hours in front of a computer screen (I’m not accusing anyone here, but from personal experience we think it’s worth worrying about for our family) can get in the way of real life, which is so much more valuable than early computer time, IMO.
Of course we will be educating our kids in Internet use and supervising it later on, before they become rebellious preteens. Our net connection is practically our extra arm. But age 3 and 4 is a little soon for us. We’ll probably start when she’s 5 or so, and even that gives me the neo-Luddite shudders.
My four-year-old can climb into my chair, wake up the computer, switch from my password-locked account to the login screen, log into his account, then run his games. If he’s in the mood, he’ll punch up iTunes and start playing his favorite MP3s.
Techno-phobia is not a problem with him. 
I am not sure as to the validity of the new studies behind this report, but I am aware of old studies which have shown that children who don’t read are less likely to develop the skill of imagination. The nuerological development of imagination is strenghtened when a person has to form their own pictures while reading, and television robs children of that process by presenting ready made images. That being said, when my children were very young they did watch television with me. I am not a huge fan of it so the viewing was limited. I am actually quite thankful for just watching my son use the remote at a very young age (18 mo. or so) and letting him scan and choose. He did not like to watch Sesame Street at all but would always stop any every and any cooking show he could find. I knew this was a bit odd for the age, and made that mental note to continue to give him that option to scan under my supervision. He never wavered in that interest (although he also enjoyed Fraggle Rock), and I would later find him up at 5 a.m. (early riser that he is) at age 6 glued to the home shopping network. When I asked him what he was watching he gleefully said, “a cooking show” 
. They were selling cookware and demonstrating. This son does have learning disabilities due to a hard birth and I am grateful to know that he has a passion for things other than the academics which have been so hard for him to master and have tagged him in his mind as “stupid” despite my relentless advocacy of his learning needs in the public school systems.
I did have a limitation on television for my children while they were younger. I was a single parent and personally didnt feel cable was a necessity. Then, I made a personal commitment to not watching any television or reading any newspapers for 3 yrs. It was an amazing experience, developing my own opinions apart from mainstream media. Believe me with everybody else glued to the media I was just as “informed” as the rest of the world and didnt miss a beat of the Clinton scandals. My children always looked forward to summers with their father so they could get their fix on television during those years, but they never really complained about it not being an option. They drew, painted, read, made incredible “forts” in their bedrooms and played outdoors using their very well developed and active imaginations, sometimes much to my chagrin.
As a general rule I think television is an activity that should not be taken without thought. And children who watch endless amounts of it would obviously not benefit. But any time I hear the word “never” when making decisions regarding tv I know it is highly unlikely that this will ever become a practice in our culture. I only met one other person during my 3 yr sabbatical who also “never” watched tv.
And they didnt have children ;).
My son is almost 2 and he does’nt see that much TV (it’s not hardly on at all, of late) when its on. He likes to turn it off when the adults are interested in something. However, he’s developed a pinpoint interest in a really old Historical romance (it’s an Austrian film about the last empress of - well - Austria). He will sit and watch this show (we’ve got it on DVD) almost from beginning to end. Favorite time is around naptime- he’ll go to sleep to it.
We got the girl a really nice desk and chair set that will grow with her. I have Carpal Tunnel from cake decorating so I am aware of the risks of repetitive stress injury. My desk setup is pretty ergonomic and she likes it enough to have requested her own trackball. I have the microsoft thumb trackball. When they no longer play stuff that uses the play keyboard over the regular one we will switch to a split keyboard. I also found the split keyboard improved my typing as well as relieving the pain in my wrists!
We don’t allow her to spend the entire day zoned at the TV or playing computer games but she likes to be just like us so we wanted to provide an outlet for her natural curiosity about the computers that really worked. She’s not happy with just a keyboard to bang away at since it doesn’t do anything. Kind of like when I’m cooking and she wants to help. I give her as much to do as I can safely. She’s no longer content to just sit on the floor with an empty bowl and a spoon.
Since her games won’t run on our systems and we had extra PCs from our last upgrade it seemed silly to not make a kid friendly computer out of one of them.
I did not get my first computer until college. Did it prepare me for the way computers are now? Not then but I crept into it slowly (and with lots of help from my husband) I’m still pretty dense when it comes to how things work behind the scenes. Yeah I don’t need to know but it would make understanding what Parallax is talking about a little easier.
This, as with everything in parenting, is up to what works for the individual family. I just wanted to present a different view that incorporated TV and computers without the extreme of the slackjawed kid who never budges from the tube for 12 hours a day.
We don’t have a TV and we don’t let the kids use our home computer, which is mainly for email and financial stuff. Both of my kids went to daycare, preschool and now public school, including an afterschool program. We’ve found that they get plenty of computer practice and exposure to most of the reasonably wholesome kid videos and cartoons anyway, through school. There are videos on rain days and the daycare and preschool lets kids bring favorite videos from home (within reason), so my kids have seen most of the Disney and Pixar stuff as well the less scatalogical popular cartoons. My daughter’s first grade class has computer training at least once a week and my son’s preschool has most of the popular little kid computer games that we would be likely to approve of. We feel that they are getting more than enough exposure to computers and TV without having it at home. At home they play imaginative games with real stuff and read books.
How dare you suggest that I deprive my child of The Simpsons.
Heathen.
Hm, when I was growing up, we lived first in Germany [early 60s] where I dont remember a television at all, I was read to, and I colored, did jigsaw puzzles, and played with my brother and the neighborhood children. We moved back into the states, and finally got a television. i remember watching Dark Shadows with my brother after school, then we did homework, had dinner and went to bed. Evenings we read and hung out in the living room with our parents. I got my own television at 14 after saving up for it for about 8 months.
My goddaughters have had fair access to television, but their mother [and I in her absence] maintain a firm schedule - after school they can play outside for an hour, then it is homework time until dinner, and after dinner they can watch tv, play on teh computer or potter around doing their own thing, and then off to bed.
My brother and I are fairly literate, and my god daughters are as well. I think that the wisest course lies in moderation, and keeping to a schedule. I would say that the structure is the most important part of child rearing, with communication both ways being the second most important. You have to be interested in your children and they have to be interested in something beyond pokemon to get along in society and gain life skills…
I’ve got three kids, and three different reactions to how they watched television. Our eldest would watch TV obsessively. He’d sit there all day if he could, and after it was turned off, he’d be a live wire, juiced on the bombardment of images.
I wasn’t sure if he even understood what he was watching. One time, after we watched an episode of “Bill Nye the Science Guy,” I asked him what the show was about (“Momentum” if you’re scoring at home).
He had no idea. Couldn’t tell me a thing about the show we had just watched.
Then the TV broke and we didn’t bother replacing it. I worked eves and we had plenty of chores and home renovation projects to keep us occupied. We gave away most of the video tapes and the VCR as well.
We weren’t trying to be radical about our no-TV policy, but it bothered a lot of people. At least three family members offered us their TVs.
Years passed. We had two more children. We moved to a home that didn’t need so much renovation work, and we started talking about getting a TV, especially when we realized that a DVD player would let us watch movies without hiring a baby-sitter. We’d go to Sears and stop in front of the TV display, especially when they were running the high-definition set, and sigh.
Then, we were offered a TV set from a family friend. It had a 28-inch screen. It looked huge. We brought it home and installed it, and started stocking up on DVDs. We even joined the Disney movie club.
Now, our two youngest kids are 5 and 7. They’ve been exposed to TV for about a year (no cable, though), and their reactions are different.
The 7-year-old girl will not watch movies. Period. She is absolutely afraid of all but the most innocous movies. She’ll watch “Mary Poppins” and “Fantasia,” but not, well, anything else by Disney. This is the same girl, mind, who when she was three, would climb up the back of my chair, grab my hands, and LEAP over my head and hit the floor. Completely physically fearless, but she will not watch “Toy Story.”
The 5-year-old likes to watch “Alice in Wonderland,” “Fantasia,” “Dumbo” and the Looney Tunes collection but not much of anything else.
Both would rather play, draw, dress up in fancy clothes, play in dad’s workshop, play in the sandbox, read, explore the family library, anything else.
They do watch some network TV, at their grandparents house. Every other month or so, we’ll visit, and they can spend the morning watching PBS.
I don’t really see a downside to this. We read to them every night, but we don’t really train them in any way. My daughter the first-grader is reading chapter books. My son (who enters kindergarten in September), is not as quick. He can pronounce the letters and maybe get a few small words, but that is all.
So we’re happy the way things are. My kids can watch movies when they want, and rarely network television. I don’t think they’re missing much that they can’t pick up in other ways. I can understand why it’s used as a pacifier and a baby-sitter. We’re fortunate; others are not.
My kids probably watch too much TV. I probably watch too much TV. It’s something we work on together as a family. Mostly they watch Noggin, which is a really good channel with lots of fairly educational programming, with favorites on Disney, PBS and Nick. We also read at bedtime and play outside go to the library, the zoo, the Science Center etc when time/weather/schedule permits. I don’t think it’s as bad as my wife does, I think it’s just worry and frustration that there’s all this laundry to do.
Both kids (son 4 and daughter 2, BTW) typically will not watch movies at home. Son has been to a few at the theatre, but movies are just too long. They find other things to do.
I grew up, as did my siblings, in a household with no television whatsoever. My parents just wouldn’t have one in the house. And my parents were hardly yuppie-hippies, or hippies, or yuppies. No way.
I was never scared by movies as a child. I liked them quite a bit. No problems there. I grew up reading voraciously (and I still do).
Should I ever have children, I would insist that they grow up the same way. Most of what is on television, especially programming for children and even more so for adolescents, is vile crap intended to turn kids into good little spending machines. And the so-called “educactional” stuff is stupid beyond belief.
It means that there seems to be a genetic component to ADHD but that’s not the whole story. Identical twins, who both have the same genes, won’t necessarily both end up with ADHD.
They use monozygotic (identical) and dizygotic (fraternal) twins often in studies because pairs of siblings will generally have the same upbringing and share a same environment, etc. This leaves genetic makeup as the only variable. So if identical twins share a trait more often than fraternal twins, there’s a good chance it’s due to their genes.
That’s what I remember from class, anyway!
I watched a fair amount of TV growing up, but I don’t consider myself to have any attention problems. I was mostly watching PBS shows like Sesame Street, though. I don’t see the harm in letting kids watch educational shows or videos, within a certain reasonable limit. Sometimes it’s just easier to learn when Elmo is teaching you!
Does it sound correct that it isn’t stating the relative difference b/w mono- and-dizygotic twins? I wonder what the difference is. Maybe I should shoot off to GQ on this.
IIRC, the reasoning for not allowing children under two to watch TV had nothing to do with progamming. I think the researchers were concerned with how a growing brain responeded to the flashing patterns emitted by the television itself.
I guess their concerns make sense. As the brain grows, it adapts to certain stimuli, and if a primary stimulus is the flash-flash-flash-flash of a cathoid-ray tube, then I suppose the brain will get to the point where it will respond better to a barrage of stimuli.
Keeping this and mind, added to the fact Mrs. Magill and I watch too much TV already. We are keeping the TV off for most of the time Pinky is up and about.
The Moto twins watch no TV whatsoever, save for those rare moments (I think about five) when we had to keep our son still for a nebulizer treatment. We used a Baby Einstein video to make this happen.
They’re seventeen months old now. I think we can hold out another year and a half. Even then, I don’t know how interested they’ll be with their very limited ration. They both love their books, and will sit still for very long periods for them.
Not only do both of my kids love being read to, but they will pull books and magazines off of the shelves and thumb through them all by themselves looking at the pictures. How can TV be a better visual stimulus than this?