A new study reveals that some parents are crazy enough to let eight-year-olds have their own TVs:
The July issue of Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine reports that third-graders with TVs in their bedrooms did worse on tests in school than those without them. In the study, which comes on top of studies that have shown excessive TV viewing to be detrimental to children’s mental and physical health, children with televisions in their bedrooms consistently scored lowest on standardized tests, and children who had computers but no TVs consistently scored the highest.The lead author, Dr. Dina L.G. Borzekowski of Johns Hopkins, said the problem didn’t appear to be television viewing per se but rather something about the way (and extent to which) children watch TV when they have complete control over it.
Dr. Borzekowski told The New York Times that the findings pointed to a simple, and obvious, course of action. “It is a physical object,” she said. “And it is a pretty straightforward thing to unplug the television set and remove it physically from the children’s bedroom.”
The effort can be reduced even farther by not putting a TV into an eight-year-old's room in the first place. The article concludes by noting that removing the child's TV might "make some parents uncomfortable." Not the parents I grew up with.
However, I doubt TV is really the causal factor here. Certainly, one could argue that perhaps people with this many TVs to go around are not poverty-stricken and are doing good by their kids in other ways. I, however, would argue that parents who are okay with putting the boob tube in their child's room are perhaps not the most attentive parents, and such lack of attentiveness could be related to low test scores as well. I wonder if the TV isn't the cause, but is, like low test scores, a by-product of parents who don't mind their kids watching MTV rather than doing supervised homework.
Posted by kswygert at July 10, 2005 11:35 AM