If you ever doubted the effect a TV in your home can have on your children, you'll be amazed at how merely placing an idiot box in their bedrooms correlates to reduced academic skills. In fact, standardized test scores of third-graders with TV sets in the bedrooms dropped about 10 points.
And that's just one of three studies published in this month's Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine. The rest of the results were just as worrisome:
- Kids who watched the most TV between ages 5-15 were least likely to graduate from high school or college by the time they turned 26 (free text link below).
- Very young children who watch a ton of TV experience reduced reading comprehension as well as other academic problems when they reach elementary school.
What interested me most about this must-read USA Today piece was the implication by the researchers interviewed that the methods parents use to raise their children are a determining factor. In other words, kids who do well in school are exposed to intellectually stimulating activities that have nothing to do with watching TV.
Many parents fail to appreciate the enormous influence they have over their children in this important area of their lives. Kids are easy and impressionable targets. It's up to us to step in and place some serious limits on the amount of time they are allowed to watch TV.
All it takes is one simple step: Turn off the television or video games and encourage your kids to take part in a productive activity like physically active play or reading. There are far too many useful activities to do in life -- places to visit, books to read, sports to play -- to waste so many hours a week watching TV and playing video games.
The stakes are just as high for their health, considering a child's exposure to countless commercials -- hawking worthless fast food and sugary processed foods -- that inflate the pockets of big business as well as the rate of obesity in this country.
Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, Vol. 159 No. 7, July 2005: 614-618 Free Full Text Article
USA Today July 5, 2005