[artkolkovk]

http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...tch-television

If people cannot completely abstain from TV, at least keep kids under two years old from watching.


heavy television viewing is strongly associated with developmental deficits—a problem considering that 39 percent of families with infants have a television on constantly when they are awake and at home. A study published in 2008 by researchers in Thailand, for instance, compared prior television use in 110 normal toddlers with that of 56 language-delayed kids and found that those who had started watching TV under age one, and who watched more than two hours per day, were six times as likely as other kids to have language problems. In another study published in the journal Pediatrics in 2004 , researchers from the University of Washington in Seattle (U.W.) reported that, in testing kids age one and three, the more television they watched, the more likely they were to have attentional problems when they were seven.

Brown admits that it is impossible to be sure that TV itself is causing these problems—heavy television viewing may simply be an indicator of bad parenting in general. "Correlation does not mean causation, so we can't say that television use and of itself makes the child have delayed language skills," she says. "There is an assumption here that if the TV were off, then time would be better spent because the parent would be engaging with the child." And in some cases, Brown admits, that might not be the case.

But one thing is not up for debate: it is far better to let children engage in unstructured play than it is to plop them in front of the TV. When U.W. researchers gave toddlers a set of toy blocks to take home and play with for six months, the kids' language skills improved compared with a group that was not given blocks.

And these types of activities are things that kids can do on their own, when parents need a few minutes to themselves, Schmidt says. "Let them get a little bored," she says. "That's how they learn to entertain themselves and make discoveries, and that's when they can think freely."