The Bay Area is a cradle of environmentalism and a region with a rich trove of health and medical research and resources. In this blog, we’ll report on the deepening understanding of how the places we inhabit and the lifestyles we adopt contribute to our own health and the health of our communities.
The statement, based on new research, reaffirms the guidance on TV for the very young first issued in 1999 by the group, a children's health organization that represents 60,000 pediatricians.
The advice is roundly ignored by most parents. About 90 percent of parents with children under 2 say their babies and toddlers watch some form of electronic media, according to the report. On average, children younger than 2 watch one to two hours of TV or videos per day. Children who live with single mothers or in low-income households tend to watch more.
The report did not speculate about the effects that moving images may have on the developing brain. Instead, it stressed that watching TV takes babies and toddlers away from other, more beneficial activities. "For every hour of television that a child younger than 2 years watches alone, he or she spends an additional 52 minutes less time per day interacting with a parent or sibling," the report said. "The importance of parents sitting down to play with their children cannot be overstated."
There is no such thing as "educational" programming for this age group, the report found, despite the fact that three-quarters of the top-selling infant videos make explicit or implicit educational claims. Children under age 1, who may appear to be mesmerized by the action on the screen, don't have the capacity to follow the sequence of images, much less a program's dialogue, the report said.
Even an adult program playing in the background can have an effect on a child. Some 39 percent of families with young children in the household have the television on constantly, according to the report. "Heavy television use in a household can interfere with a child's language development simply because parents likely spend less time talking to the child," the statement said.
The group contends that "unstructured playtime is more valuable for the developing brain than any electronic media exposure." For example, parents could let their child play with nesting cups on the kitchen floor while they cook dinner.
The statement did not address the use of smartphone apps or electronic games for the very young.
Lou Judson
Joseph Chilton Pearce presented the same information, also for children up to seven years old, in Evolution's End: Claiming the Potential of Our Intelligence (1992) ISBN 0-06250-693-5. He says the basic evolutionary trait of reflected vs firelight makes it so that sunlight and reflected light is better than artificial light.
Interesting to see that humanity has ignored his advice, and is reinventing the research but still not changing behaviour. I had no television until I was 7, and those who are younger have different brain structure it seems to me.
L
Sylvia Paull
I wonder how watching television two hours or more a day affects older people. If someone were funded to do a study, they'd probably find television-watching has adverse effects on the retention of intellectual capabilities as well as intellectual development for those past 65.