New York Times sez to keep the TV out of your kid's room. We never
allowed my stepson to have a TV in his room. He could turn on the light
and read if he couldn't sleep, but he wasn't supposed to watch TV
without supervision.
In 1959 the pediatrician told my parents to move the TV into my sister's
room to help her pass the time while she recovered from nephritis. My
parents didn't have a TV so they bought one and put it in my sister's
room. I bought myself a TV when I was about 17 and put it in the
bedroom and watched weird religious programming at 5:00 a.m. No, I
don't have a point. Why?
_________
Here’s one simple way to keep your children healthy: Ban the bedroom TV.
By some estimates, half of American children have a television in their
bedroom; one study of third graders put the number at 70 percent. And a
growing body of research shows strong associations between TV in the
bedroom and numerous health and educational problems.
Children with bedroom TVs score lower on school tests and are more
likely to have sleep problems. Having a television in the bedroom is
strongly associated with being overweight and a higher risk for smoking.
One of the most obvious consequences is that the child will simply end
up watching far more television — and many parents won’t even know.
In a study of 80 children in Buffalo, ages 4 to 7, the presence of a
television in the bedroom increased average viewing time by nearly nine
hours a week, to 30 hours from 21. And parents of those children were
more likely to underestimate their child’s viewing time.
“If it’s in the bedroom, the parents don’t even really know what the
kids are watching,” said Leonard H. Epstein, professor of pediatrics and
social and preventive medicine at the School of Medicine and Biomedical
Science at the State University of New York at Buffalo. “Oftentimes,
parents who have a TV in the kids’ bedrooms have TVs in their bedrooms.”
Moreover, once the set is in the child’s room, it is very likely to
stay. “In our experience, it is often hard for parents to remove a
television set from a child’s bedroom,” Dr. Epstein said.
Dr. Epstein and his colleagues put monitoring devices on bedroom TVs and
all the other sets in the house. In one two-year study, the devices in
half the homes were programmed to reduce children’s overall viewing time
by half. (Children had to use a code to turn on any TV in the home, and
the code stopped working once the allocated TV time for the week had
been reached.)
Although all the children in the study gained weight as they grew,
relative body mass index dropped among those with mandatory time limits.
The researchers found that cutting into TV time did not increase
exercise levels. Instead, the children snacked less, lowering their
consumption more than 100 calories a day. The study, published Monday in
The Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, did not break down
the data by bedroom television viewing.
But in 2002, the journal Pediatrics re****ted that preschool children
with bedroom TVs were more likely to be overweight. In October, the
journal Obesity suggested that the risk might be highest for boys. In a
study among French adolescents, boys with a bedroom television were more
likely than their peers to have a larger waist size and higher body fat
and body mass index.
The French study also showed, not surprisingly, that boys and girls with
bedroom TVs spent less time reading than others.
Other data suggest that bedroom television affects a child’s schoolwork.
In a 2005 study in The Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine,
researchers looked at the television, computer and video game habits of
almost 400 children in six Northern California schools for a year. About
70 percent of the children in the study had their own TV in the bedroom;
they scored significantly and consistently lower on math, reading and
language-arts tests. Students who said they had computers in their homes
scored higher.
Why a bedroom television appears to have such a pronounced impact is
unclear. It may be that it’s a distraction during homework time or that
it interferes with sleep, resulting in poorer performance at school. It
could also suggest less overall parental involvement.
Another October study, published in Pediatrics, showed that
kindergartners with bedroom TVs had more sleep problems. Those kids were
also less “emotionally reactive,” meaning that they weren’t as moody or
as bothered by changes in routine. While that sounds like a good thing,
the researchers speculated that having a TV in the bedroom dampened the
intensity with which a child responded to stimulation.
Another study of more than 700 middle-school students, ages 12 to 14,
found that those with bedroom TVs were twice as likely to start smoking
— even after controlling for such risk factors as having a parent or
friend who smokes or low parental engagement. Among kids who had a TV in
the bedroom 42 percent smoked; among the others, the figure was 16
percent.
“I think it matters quite a lot,” Dr. Epstein said. “There are all kinds
of problems that occur when kids have TVs in their bedroom.”
So while many parents try to limit how much television and what type of
shows their children watch, that may be less than half the battle. Where
a child watches is im****tant too.
--
Dover
|
