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Wednesday, May 9, 2007

Things that are Sad (only minimal Asa content)

I saw two things in the past 24 hours that I thought were sad. The first was this snippet from Slate.com:

"Forty percent of 3-month-old infants regularly watch TV, videos, or DVDs, according to a survey. By their second birthdays, 90 percent of toddlers watch regularly. The median age at which kids start watching regularly is 9 months. Average viewing time for 0-year-olds: 1 hour per day. Thirty percent of parents claim their kids' TV shows are "good for his or her brain." Researchers' formal conclusion: Make "educated choices" about what your kid watches, and watch it with them. Researchers' informal conclusions: 1) Stop turning your kid into a moron who can't sustain attention and succeed in school. 2) Stop believing all that "Baby Einstein" crap about videos being good for your kid. (For a previous update on parents who push TV on their kids, click here. For bedroom TV and sex, click here.) "

I think the thing that most disturbed me was the part in the abstract where "Parents gave education, entertainment, and babysitting as major reasons for media exposure in their children younger than 2 years."

Education? In a review of research on children & television in the journal Pediatrics in 2001, the authors stated quite clearly, "Research has shown primary negative health effects on violence and aggressive behavior; sexuality; academic performance; body concept and self-image; nutrition, dieting, and obesity; and substance use and abuse patterns." While I guess this is an education, I doubt it is the message parents intend.

On the other hand, there might be some benefits to certain programs... although likely not as much as engaging in other activities (interesting study on block play). One study of television watching in infants and toddlers found,"At 30 months of age, watching Dora the Explorer, Blue’s Clues, Arthur, Clifford, or Dragon Tales resulted in greater vocabularies and higher expressive language scores; watching Teletubbies was related to fewer vocabulary words and smaller expressive language scores; watching Sesame Street was related only to smaller expressive language scores; and viewing Barney & Friends was related to fewer vocabulary words and more expressive language."

Another study states that there is: "evidence that attention and comprehension, receptive vocabulary, some expressive language, letter-sound knowledge, and knowledge of narrative and storytelling all benefit from high-quality and ageappropriate educational programming." It also offers the caveat that, "For children under the age of two, the literature is far less certain about the language benefits of the current crop of children’s television."
In looking at the stats on kids and television, however, I learned that 83% of kids birth to 6 use some form of screen media. This is the same number of children as play outside and more than read or are read to (79%). Furthermore, they spend more time with screen media than with books. Not surprisingly, those kids who are heavy tv watchers are also less likely to know how to read as they get older.

So Asa hasn't really seen tv. He's seen it at other people's houses and stares open-mouthed at it. In general, he seems a little overwhelmed by the sound and pictures. We basically haven't watched any since he was born either. I think I missed it at first, and I still sometimes miss watching movies, but not enough to actually get any. Computers, on the other hand, are ubiquitous. It's how I get my news, entertainment, and communicate with people. I'm sure he'll use a computer fairly early (with major supervision). Somehow, I feel like this is more educational; although I'm not sure that the research would back me up.

The other thing I saw was on the Target.com website. It was an ad for infant toys (mobiles, baby gyms, and the like), and the banner read: "Toys to coax first smiles". Aren't smiles the beginnings of SOCIAL development? Shouldn't we therefore encourage them to be at PEOPLE? Maybe I'm just being overly sensitive here.

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