I happened across Bedroom TV makes kids emotionally numb: study. The article is about a recent study by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Here are some of the interesting quotes:
"Putting a television in the bedroom makes children emotionally blunted, a large new study shows."
and
"Forty-one per cent of the kindergarteners studied had a bedroom TV."
The study found that some problems went away if children stopped watching television.
It looks like the study is getting lots of press. Google News shows over 80 news articles on the study.
Here is the press release. It is worth reading the whole press release.
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Technorati tags: children, television
5 comments:
We know about this first hand. My two stepsons didn't get along very well and both had TV's in their rooms from the time they were 10 or so. That way they could watch TV or play their video game without fighting. This was a huge mistake on our part! And computers are also a mistake to put in their room. It is not just the safety issue (which is very important). But when the computers are in their rooms, they go in there and stop associating with the family.
We are not making that same mistake this time around.
Studies like this one remind me that socialization begins in the home.
I have a tendency to think that there's a bigger lesson here than simply having a piece of electronic equipment in a child's room.
My kindergarten age son would rather spend time with one or both of his parents than watch TV or play on the computer any time, even if the activity is something less than exciting like spreading grass seed, picking dandelions or watching grass grow.
I'd wager that if families were spending their off-time doing things together other than staring at a screen, the location of those screens wouldn't matter nearly so much.
Is this correlation or causation?
Perhaps it's more that emotionally distant families are more likely to distance themselves from each other by stuffing tv's a children's bedrooms?
My kids have one in theirs. It gets used once a week for a movie maybe although we've never put limits on it. I don't think it's the TV's fault anymore then it was the video games or the Dungeons and Dragons or the comic books or the novels. It's families that have emotional vacuums and haven't the foggiest idea of how to fill them.
That's stunning, that nearly half of all kindergarteners have a TV in their room. I wonder how many of those are hooked up to cable and these 5-year-olds are watching MTV.
My kids will never have a TV or computer in their rooms. From the beginning, those devices have been front-and-center in the family room. We push them as family devices. The exception being the one in my office, which is for work.
This has never been an issue for us. Our kids certainly enjoy the TV and computer, just not by themselves away from the family.
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