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The Trouble with TV Time for Tots
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My wife is about two months away from giving birth to our first child-a girl-and she's already affecting our habits. In particular, our television habits: We used to throw ourselves into a corner of the couch to watch "30 Rock" or "The Wire" in the evenings, but my wife finds it hard these days to get comfortable in her usual couch-potato positions. She moves across the room to a chair, but inevitably gets tired of that and goes upstairs to get in bed and (if you can believe this) read a book . And she's fine with that. Apparently there are other things to do besides watch the tube.
But if our daughter-to-be is going to mess with our TV time, we're going to mess with hers, too. Once this kid is born, we're going to cut the broadcasting day to a bare minimum in her early, formative years. The latest study in this area says that television-even if it's just playing in the background-greatly cuts down on parent-child verbal interaction, and that can mean the child's language development. Not just the baby's viewing, but the parents', too.
"Some of these reductions are likely due to children being left alone in front of the television screen, but others likely reflect situations in which adults, though present, are distracted by the screen and not interacting with their infant in a discernable manner," says head researcher Dr. Dimitri A. Christakis, of Seattle Children's Hospital and the University of Washington. The study was just published in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine .
These findings are the latest in a string of news that indicates you shouldn't plop your baby down in front of the TV-particularly in the first two years, while his or her brain is still developing. Too-young television watching has been linked to ADHD
And then there's television content that is designed specifically to make your infant smarter. The controversy over this issue peaked two years ago, when then-President Bush hosted Julie Aigner-Clark, creator of the "Baby Einstein" videos, at a State of the Union address. Bush heralded Aigner-Clark as a hero, but her line of videos-now owned by Disney-and similar videos have been revealed to be something significantly less beneficial to babes than it claims to be.
It seems like common sense, really. But many parents have told me that the TV-as-babysitter scenario, no matter how wrong it is, nevertheless can be an alluring siren's song that promises an hour or two of quiet time. Still, once our baby arrives, our household's TV-watching will dwindle to the bare minimum. One of us may sneak off to catch an episode of "The Office" every once in a while, but our kid will have to wait a while before she can thrill to the sublime bone-headedness of Michael Scott
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