TV Can Stunt Your Baby’s Mental Development: Study
Posted May 8, 2007 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
It’s a startling claim and ironically, you may have first heard about on TV. A new study shows babies that are exposed to too much television pay for it later in life with trouble concentrating and a stunted attention span.
A Seattle pediatrician found that 40 percent of infants only three months old and 90 percent of toddlers aged two or younger are already watching more than 90 minutes of the boob tube a day. Dr. Dimitri Christakis believes that hinders their cognitive ability later in life, even if the programs you show them are the educational kind – like “Baby Einstein” or ” Sesame Street” – that are supposed to help them learn early.
Two year-old Nico is one of those who’s mesmerized by the images on the screen. His family has noticed it, too. “I guess it’s kind of stimulating him like mentally and everything and so it’s actually developing his intellectual side,” believes his uncle Christopher Cruz. Not so, claims Christakis. “The best available evidence to date suggests that certainly watching a lot of TV before the age of two is in fact harmful — harmful in terms of children’s attentional abilities later in life, harmful in terms of their cognitive development, both of those measured at school entry.”
“Parents are getting the message loud and clear from marketers of TV and videos that this is good for their kids,” outlines co-author Dr. Frederick Zimmerman. “That it will help their brain development … None of this stuff has ever been proven.”
So why do so many parents stick their kids in front of the screen?
29% believe television is educational or good for their child’s brain
21% believe it gives them time to get things done while the child is entertained.
“People have the assumption that parents used this as a babysitter, that’s their primary motivator,” Christakis responds. “But in fact what we found was that the Number 1 reason they give is that it’s good for their children’s brain. They think it’s actually good and it’s not surprising that they think that because they’ve been marketed to quite aggressively with claims to that effect. But the reality is quite different.” He suggests getting kids to perform activities on their own is the key to turning on their minds – and turning off the sets.
But not everyone thinks you should take it to extremes. “W e need to be reasonable about this and also understand that in some of our lifestyles, having your kid watch TV for half an hour means that you can get dinner on the table,”suggests Laura Bickle of Today’s Parent Magazine.
Cdn. Pediatric Society: How to manage media use in your home
Public Health Agency of Canada
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