Television Affects Parent-Child Interaction

A new report has found that parent-child interactions suffer when a television is blaring in the background.

Researchers are saying that the finding is important because more than one-third of American infants and toddlers live in homes where the television is on most or all the time, even if no one's watching.

In the study, published in the September/October issue of the journal Child Development, a team at the University of Massachusetts observed about 50 children, aged 1, 2 and 3 years, who were with a parent at a university child study center.

For half of a one-hour session, parents and children were in a playroom without a television; in the other half-hour, parents chose a program to watch.

The researchers studied how much verbal interaction there was between parents and children, whether parents were actively involved in their children's play, and whether they responded to each other's questions and suggestions.

The study authors found that while the TV was on, parents spent about 20 percent less time talking to their children and were less active, attentive and responsive to their kids, resulting in a decrease in the quality of the interactions.

"Although previous research found that background television disrupts young children's solitary play, this is the first study to demonstrate its impact on the quantity and quality of parent-child interactions," the researchers explained in a news release from the Society for Research in Child Development.

"Given that high-quality parent-child interaction plays an important role in children's development, the study challenges the common assumption that background TV doesn't affect very young children if they don't look at the screen," the researchers concluded.

TV is not going to help boost your baby's IQ

I read a very interesting article today on CNN. A study was performed by the Researchers from Children's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, and Harvard Medical School, to challenge the usefulness of baby educational videos and DVDs. Baby Einstein DVD's have been a very popular brand over the last few years. Many parents have purchased them thinking that they will in fact make their child smarter, increase their IQ or teach them to speak earlier. These studies have proven otherwise.

"Contrary to parents' perceptions that TV viewing is beneficial to their children's brain development, we found no evidence of cognitive benefit from watching TV during the first two years of life," the authors wrote.

Educational DVD and videos geared towards enriching babies and toddlers, such as "BabyGenius," "Brainy Baby" or "Baby Einstein," which proclaim to "encourage discovery and inspire," have no benefits, researchers said.

"The best thing for our kids is to provide them with stimulus that we know is positive for their brain development," Rich said. He suggesting activities like reading, singing, interacting and stacking blocks to help children.

Yet another study was performed in 2007 by the University of Washington.


"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."

Unfortunately in today's society many parents use their television set as their baby's babysitter or tutor in some cases. Children need one on one interaction not with the television set but with their parents.

To continue reading the remainder of these articles please visit

Study: Want a smart baby? TV's not going to help
and

Baby Einsteins: Not so smart after all

What Happy People Don't Do

Interesting article from the New York Times:

Although people who describe themselves as happy enjoy watching television, it turns out to be the single activity they engage in less often than unhappy people, said John Robinson, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland and the author of the study,  which appeared in the journal Social Indicators Research.

While most large studies on happiness have focused on  the demographic characteristics of happy people - factors like age and marital status - Dr. Robinson and his colleagues  tried to identify what activities happy people engage in. The study relied primarily on the responses of 45,000 Americans collected over 35 years by the University of Chicago's General Social Survey, and on published "time diary" studies recording the daily activities of participants. 

"We looked at 8 to 10 activities that happy people engage in, and for one, the people who did the activities more - visiting others, going to church, all those things - were more happy, " Dr. Robinson said. "TV was the one activity that showed a negative relationship. Unhappy people did it more,  and happy people did it less."

To read the entire article please visit this link.