Kids and Boob Tubes

Today, a good friend of mine posted this article from last week's Time magazine on his Facebook page. It talks about those video programs like Baby Einstein that imply that if you plop your child down in front of the screen they'll get smarter. That's a load of hooey, of course, and this article debunks that idea with research. But it goes further than simply refuting the notion and actually suggests that children who spend too much time in front of the boob tube actually have a disadvantage developmentally. Interesting. Not that surprising, I suppose.

Here's an article from the New York Times website back in March, also citing research to debunk the myth of kids learning in front of the TV. But its secondary conclusion indicates that kids who watch TV are no worse off than kids who don't, which probably comes as quite a surprise to a lot of new-age no-TV parents. It says that watching television is "neither beneficial nor deleterious to child cognitive and language abilities."

So who do you believe? Research data can be manipulated pretty much any way you want in order to reach the conclusions you're looking for. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that you don't let kids under 2 years old watch anything at all, and a lot of people take that really seriously. For us, we've discovered that Marcus, at the tender age of 3 months, will watch The Wiggles for up to 30 minutes at a time. I assume he's not understanding any of it at all, but the movement and the colors and the songs at least keep him occupied long enough to give Janelle a short break in the middle of the day.

I wouldn't dispute the idea that watching too much TV makes kids fat and lazy. But making them slow? I don't know about that. I think if you park your kid in front of a screen for too many hours every single day, you're probably not a very good parent and don't interact with the child much. You're probably a little slow yourself, and chances are your kid is going to inherit that anyway. But you know, for the 10 hours a day that Marcus is awake, if he spends 30 minutes in front of the computer screen watching grown men prance around in bright-colored outfits singing Old McDonald ... and if that buys you a little time and a little sanity ... that's probably okay.