Tv-tittande är skadligt för barn under utveckling

Ella Sirl can't tie her shoes. And most of her breakfast still winds up in her hair as she tries to spoon some oatmeal into her mouth. But the little 2-year-old from Cleveland has some definite opinions about TV. Ella has been watching the tube since infancy. She loves "Dora the Explorer" and is fascinated by the shapes and colors she sees on her "Baby Einstein" DVDs. And she's even developed a tiny-tot crush on the iconic Captain Kirk, cooing at the screen as she watches "Star Trek" re-runs with her dad, Rick.

Ella isn't the only toddler sitting in front of the television set. By 3 months of age, 40 percent of infants are regular TV and DVD viewers, according to new research appearing this week in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. By the time kids reach 2 years of age, 90 percent are watching television. ¹

These days it's hard to shock anyone with alarming statistics about kids and TV. But a new study published in the journal Pediatrics this week manages to do just that. Researchers found that a fifth of U.S. children from 6 months through 2 years old and more than a third of kids 3 to 6 years old have televisions in their bedrooms. Alas.

"It's basically unsupervised viewing," says Dr. Don Shifrin, chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics' (AAP) media committee. So much for snuggling while mom reads "Good Night Moon." "They're not doing other things that should be going on in the bedroom—reading books, socializing with family, settling down for bedtime, pulling out the stuffed animals," says Michael Rich, director of the Center on Media and Child Health at Harvard University. Kids with televisions in their rooms also log more time in front of the tube—and pack on the pounds, says Rich. "The more TV you watch, the heavier you are." Parents' No. 1 reason for putting a TV in a child's room: to free up other televisions so family members can view their own shows. They avoid "conflicts over who's going to watch what," says the Kaiser Family Foundation's Victoria Rideout, a study coauthor. Parents also erroneously believe the TV will help their kids fall asleep. "It's stimuli!" says the study's lead author, Elizabeth Vandewater, associate director of the Population Research Center at the University of Texas in Austin and a mom who watches TV in her living room with her 7- and 11-year-old kids. The new study also found that nearly 70 percent of kids under 2 watch TV despite the AAP's recommendation that they avoid any screen time. Jean Lotus, a mother of five who founded the anti-TV group the White Dot, says parents turn on the tube in their babies' rooms because "they think it will make their kids smarter because of all the Baby Einstein stuff. … The added benefit is [the] kid goes in their bedroom for five hours and doesn't bug you." A previous KFF study found that a quarter of U.S. kids live in homes with five or more TVs. The experts' advice: don't put any of them in Junior's room. ²

Vi har alltså fastställt att dagens barn spenderar otroligt mycket ensam tid framför TV:n. Frågan är då: hur hälsosamt är detta? Frederick Zimmerman och doktor Dimitri Christakis från Washingtons universitet sitter på det alarmerande svaret:

The claim always seemed too good to be true: park your infant in front of a video and, in no time, he or she will be talking and getting smarter than the neighbor's kid. In the latest study on the effects of popular videos such as the "Baby Einstein" and "Brainy Baby" series, researchers find that these products may be doing more harm than good. And they may actually delay language development in toddlers.

Led by Frederick Zimmerman and Dr. Dimitri Christakis, both at the University of Washington, the research team found that with every hour per day spent watching baby DVDs and videos, infants learned six to eight fewer new vocabulary words than babies who never watched the videos. These products had the strongest detrimental effect on babies 8 to 16 months old, the age at which language skills are starting to form. "The more videos they watched, the fewer words they knew," says Christakis. "These babies scored about 10% lower on language skills than infants who had not watched these videos."

It's not the first blow to baby videos, and likely won't be the last. Mounting evidence suggests that passive screen sucking not only doesn't help children learn, but could also set back their development. Last spring, Christakis and his colleagues found that by three months, 40% of babies are regular viewers of DVDs, videos or television; by the time they are two years old, almost 90% are spending two to three hours each day in front of a screen. Three studies have shown that watching television, even if it includes educational programming such as Sesame Street, delays language development. "Babies require face-to-face interaction to learn," says Dr. Vic Strasburger, professor of pediatrics at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine and a spokesperson for the American Academy of Pediatrics. "They don't get that interaction from watching TV or videos. In fact, the watching probably interferes with the crucial wiring being laid down in their brains during early development." Previous studies have shown, for example, that babies learn faster and better from a native speaker of a language when they are interacting with that speaker instead of watching the same speaker talk on a video screen. "Even watching a live person speak to you via television is not the same thing as having that person in front of you," says Christakis.

This growing evidence led the Academy to issue its recommendation in 1999 that no child under two years old watch any television. The authors of the new study might suggest reading instead: children who got daily reading or storytelling time with their parents showed a slight increase in language skills.

Though the popular baby videos and DVDs in the Washington study were designed to stimulate infants' brains, not necessarily to promote language development, parents generally assume that the products' promises to make their babies smarter include improvement of speaking skills. But, says Christakis, "the majority of the videos don't try to promote language; they have rapid scene changes and quick edits, and no appearance of the 'parent-ese' type of speaking that parents use when talking to their babies."

As far as Christakis and his colleagues can determine, the only thing that baby videos are doing is producing a generation of overstimulated kids. "There is an assumption that stimulation is good, so more is better," he says. "But that's not true; there is such a thing as overstimulation." His group has found that the more television children watch, the shorter their attention spans later in life. "Their minds come to expect a high level of stimulation, and view that as normal," says Christakis, "and by comparison, reality is boring." ³

Detta borde räcka för att varna alla föräldrar med småbarn: spendera tid med era barn och stimulera dem naturligt genom språk- och bokstavsövningar, inte med fördummande tv-program.