So, we now have proof: watching TV is really, really bad for children of all ages.
Internet sources are abit hazy about how many hours of TV is too many, but the cut-off point seems to be 2 hours a day.
Sources also seem to lump TV in with special kids’ programmes (like Sesame street) or even the DVD’s meant especially for children.
Since TV is such an excellent baby-sitter and such a pleasure for children, (you’d be amazed how easily I can feed my toddler his veggies if we are sitting together behind YouTube!) I wonder if TV does have any redeeming qualities. It can’t be all bad, can it? Please?
My understanding is that the problem with TV and DVDs, even educational ones, is that they’re so passive. In order to learn and develop, kids need to do stuff; they need to engage with the world around them. So the issue isn’t how much TV is too much, but how much (non-passive, engaging) activity is too little.
It’s been coming out for a while now. Those Baby Einstein DVDs were the worst. Babies who watched those a lot wound up with less vocabulary, and so on. Some were supposed to teach other languages, but had no effect (because children have to interact with a person and see the face). Bottom line–children are designed by nature to DO stuff and interact with people, not sit passively and absorb. They don’t work that way.
The last thing I read about it was a book called NurtureShock, about new research on children’s development. So you could go read that.
I’d say that if you and your son are watching YouTube together and giggling over videos and having so much fun that he forgets he hates his vegetables, then he’s getting interaction with you AND good nutrition, and the TV part of it doesn’t come into play.
Several years ago a friend offered us her child’s collection of Baby Einstein videos because he had “finished all of them.” She made it sound as if it was like taking a college course. Noting that her little Einstein is fat and is often mistaken for a special needs child, we declined.
Honestly, they don’t actually do much on their own, but I have to say that I would balance parental sanity gains against what the program isn’t providing educationally or socially.
So if Mommy uses a half-hour of Wiggles or Sesame Street to take a shower or eat something that wasn’t sampled or regurgitated by small children already and that makes her a happier and more interactive mommy in the other 23.5 hours, that’s a net gain.
If Mommy on the other hand is letting Jr spend 5-10 hours in front of the boob tube while she plays WoW or talks with friends or works in her office, and then in the other 19-14 hours with him they are plopped in front of the extra computer monitor watching YouTube while she works on other things and ignores him, that’s probably a great deal less helpful for Jr’s development.
In neither instance am I counting the impact of the programming itself - just how the parent is using it.
Oops, here’s the link. It’s a Cracked article with lots of serious research behind it.
Thudlow Boink, watching Dora the Explorer and such programs does require interaction. [unbearable cheerful Dora voice]*How many stars do we need to count before we can rescue the snow princess? …That is right, five! * [/unbearable cheerful Dora voice]. I’m just not sure that is the kind of and the amount of interaction that is needed to keep my kids brain from rotting.
Do they necessarily have to be educational, though? We can let kids watch TV just because sometimes parents need that break or because sometimes kids just like watching it, but without expecting them to have had an enriching experience from it. That is, if you want your kid to learn something, you can read them a story or take them to a museum–but save the TV for when you just want something mindless.
I think the availability of TV has something to do with it.
When I was a wee little shaver there was one TV and we would “fight” over what to watch. And if you lost, which the little guy always did :), you simply went and did something else.
Now with DVRs and videotapes etc, you CAN watch all the TV you want.
I recall being nine and working over a year at a paper route, shoveling snow and cutting grass and I finally got a B&W TV of my own. Cost over a $100.
But still I found most of it boring. When I was home in the summer after 9am all that was on was game shows and soap operas. So I didn’t watch it. It was boring, even when I had a choice.
Now kids have access to all sorts of INTERESTING programming whenever they demand it.
This I think creates the problem that we didn’t have in the past.
As others said, it’s hard to draw the line at too much. Where is it to be drawn? I mean I loved to watch TV but I loved to read as well. I liked to watch TV but I also liked to play “Guns” and “Pirates” with my friends just as much.
Not having kids I can’t be sure of how different it is to rear them now, but it seems to be a lot different. My mother would’ve thought of nothing of letting me out of the house at 8am and not seeing me till lunch. Then I was gone again till just before it got dark.
That’s pretty much what I take from it. TV is a convenient babysitter, but don’t fool yourself into thinking that your child is benefiting. I’ve heard stories of people who seriously believed that the Baby Einstein videos were beneficial, and would have their kids watch them for many hours a week–because it was supposed to be good for them. Don’t do that. But I think we can all survive a little Sesame Street in the name of mindless fun and a break for Mom.
I’ve noticed that my almost-three year old makes both books and TV watching the grounds for hours and hours of imaginative play (Lord, I am sick of Thomas the Tank Engine). I try to limit it, but we have a second little one, and my older kid will watch a five minute Youtube video, and then go and spend ten minutes playing with his trains and retelling the story or telling a new one.
This makes me feel like a less bad Mommy for wanting to read or unload the dishwasher or something.
We let our kids watch Dora and Blue Clues a few times, but we noticed that they didn’t interact with the shows as they were expected to. We repeated some of the questions to prompt them to answer and they said “They tell you the answer if you just wait for it.” Those shows are designed to be watched multiple times. In fact, they often show the same episode several days in a row. A kid who appears to be engaged and doing well answering the questions may have gotten the answer from a previous viewing and has learned nothing except rote memorization.
Was the book any good? He was supposed to give a talk near me a couple of months ago and I didn’t go because he sounded a bit out there. But if he’s got real studies and such then I’ll have to rethink reading the book.
It was your basic lay science book, nothing weird. Each chapter covered a different development in knowledge, talking about the studies and how they were done, what it seems to mean, etc. Some will be well-known to you already, such as the discouraging effect of indiscriminate praise–I know we’ve talked about that here. There was another chapter, I think, about teens’ sleep cycles and how much improvement you can get just by moving the start of high school to an hour later.
Well I might have to look into it then. When I saw he was speaking, and not knowing anything about him, I looked a bit into it. Some of the reviews on Amazon, and just the way the poster was made kind of made him look a bit woowoo to me. Now I wish I had gone.
I’m a preschool teacher, and we go pretty light on the videos because there are usually richer things the kids can be doing at school. However, if we are studying rockets, a one minute Youtube video of a rocket launch is an exciting experience, much more visceral and real than my feltboard explanation of rocket stages. The feltboard comes first, though, so the kids know what to expect. There’s a huge amount of fire! And a piece falls off! On purpose! And a little parachute appears! And then the piece splashes down in the ocean for real!
If we’re learning about how birds hatch, or kids playing traditional games in another country, or how an animal changes its color to match its background, same thing. We read about it, we role play it, but then watching it on Youtube is powerful.
After a couple weeks of learning about Martin Luther King, Jr. we watched one minute of his “I have a dream” speech. You could see it slam the kids right in the heart, and these are four and five year olds. Of course I am selective, but there is such a wonderful, huge selection on the internet for free.
(Then we learned about George Washington and the kids demanded to hear him speak on the computer.)
My parents were convinced video games were healthy for my cognitive development. I’m 26 and for a time I basically lived on the NES and SNES. As it seems, at the very least it was better than watching TV all day.
