Call me old-fashioned, but I am personally appalled at the notion of parking children in front of the television. On a recent plane flight, two young parents pulled out a DVD player and proceeded to show Finding Nemo to their infant, who couldn’t have been more than 8 months old. Okay, I know it’s tough to travel with small children, but good grief.
It’s not that I think TV is necessarily BAD for kids, but the fact that it is such a passive experience and substitutes for other activities children SHOULD be doing (playing and talking with family members and friends) bothers me. If a child needs some indoors time, at least make it an interactive process, such as computer time or videogaming. As one of my “techie” students pointed out, he and his gaming buddies aced all of their middle school vocabulary tests, because the games they were playing actually used some pretty sophisticated words.
In contrast, those who think playing Baby Einstein and other “educational” videos for their children may actually be retarding their infants’ vocabulary growth. A new study by Frederick Zimmerman suggests that for each hour of video watching per day, children experienced a loss of 6-8 vocabulary words relative to their non-video watching peers, or an overall drop of 17%.
Back in 1999, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a policy paper recommending that parents avoid television for children under the age of 2 years. Zimmerman’s paper provides strong support for this policy.
While we’re at it, I surely wish that young parents would stop yakking on their cell phones when they’re out with their small children. How about talking with your children? How else are they going to learn? And guess what? Kids truly have some very interesting things to say. If you have trouble thinking about topics to talk about, try some Jean Piaget. When my oldest was 4, I asked her why clouds moved across the sky. After considerable thought, she replied that “the airplanes pull them.” Parenting doesn’t get any better than that!
2 Comments
fayzi · August 12, 2007 at 11:53 am
I totally agreed with you. I often see parents use TV to make the children quiet. Apart of vocabulary deprive, is there any other known research to shows that TV is bad for young children?
And thanks for the Piaget tips. I look forward to try it with my kid (not have one yet 🙂
Laura Freberg · August 12, 2007 at 1:58 pm
Hi, Fayzi.
Here’s another link to the American Academy of Pediatrics site that discusses the effects of television on children:
http://www.aap.org/family/tv1.htm
The page discusses issues such as violence in programs, exposure to advertising, obesity, etc.
We have 3 (now grown) daughters, and I wouldn’t trade these experiences for anything! Good luck with your own (future) family!
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