1. ddobbs
  2. TV and infants, the (overdue) review study

TV and infants, the (overdue) review study

By ddobbs on January 13, 2009.

Someone finally did a review study on TV -- including "educational DVDs" -- and infants. Among results that should not surprise ...

Watching TV programmes or DVDs aimed at infants can actually delay language development, according to a number of studies. For example, a 2008 Thai study published in Acta Paediatrica found that if children under 12 months watched TV for more than two hours a day they were six times more likely to have delayed language skills. Another study found that children who watched baby DVDs between seven and 16 months knew fewer words than children who did not.

is at least one that shocks me, anyway:

29 per cent of parents who took part in a survey of 1,000 American families published in 2007 said they let their infants watch TV because they thought it was "good for their brains".

Where do they get these ideas? Successful marketing.

Along with the Scientific Blogging write-up, you can find more at the Telegraph and Canada.com. An earlier story examined a 2000-infant study that showed links between TV watching at 2 and ADHD at 7.

Tags
Brains and minds
Reading

More like this

Boob tube
I switched on the boob tube the other day while folding laundry and somehow ended up watching children's television. (What? It happens.) On Nickelodeon (motto: "Entertaining stoned adults since, I dunno, 1982?") I caught the tail end of a show called "Yo Gabba Gabba." Per the description on the…
Should you let your toddler/preschooler watch TV? Part II
When Jim and Nora were toddlers, they were huge fans of everything Disney. Here they're wearing their Disney pajamas as they play next to their Seven Dwarves figurines, underneath their TV, which was frequently used to watch Disney videos. We even took them to Disney World, where they had an…
Does TV make you hyper? dumb? lazy? distracted? What was the question?
Jim Schnabel has an interesting story at Nature, free to all viewers, on the tetchy difficult of assessing how TV affects kids. I've often wondered whether the rise in ADHD diagnoses was due at least partly to TV. This story looks at a researcher who -- amazed at how riveted his infant son was by…
Joint Attention and Social Compentence, or what a baby pointing at a toy says about well-behaved toddlers
One of the key components of "normal" child development is social competence. We expect kids to become gradually better at behaving respectfully towards peers, to comply with requests made by others, to understand the thoughts of others, to play together with kids and adults, to sustain attention,…