TV and Your Child's Ability to Think and Learn

Suzanne loves her seven-month-old daughter, Brianne, so she feeds her vegetables, changes her diaper when needed, rocks her, and comforts her when she's afraid. But Suzanne also does something that she doesn't know may be hurting her daughter: she uses television as a babysitter for several hours a day while she does household chores.

What Suzanne doesn't know is that the American Association of Pediatricians recommends that Brianne shouldn't watch TV at all — not until she's two.1 No Teletubbies? No Barney? No Sesame Street? You might be wondering: Is it unwise to deprive a child of the educational opportunities available through TV? According to research, television can hinder a child's education later, because it can negatively affect a young child's developing brain.

Can Children Develop ADD From Watching TV?

In the early days of "Sesame Street," producers noticed that the program wasn't moving fast enough on street scenes to keep kids' attention. What did they do? They utilized advertising research which showed that the best way to engage viewers was through ad-like shorts with quick movement, bursts of color, and loud noises. The result was a cross between entertainment and education, which became known as "edutainment."2 Sure enough, it's kept kids attention since 1969. But can fast-paced ad-like programming make kids hyperactive? Some researchers think so.

According to a study by pediatricians at the University of Washington, which was published in the journal Pediatrics, one hour of daily television by children birth to three was directly tied to as much as 10 percent loss of attentiveness when the child reached age seven. Should we be concerned? We should when 2,500 kids were studied.3

The results of the study took into consideration that during the early stages of brain development, "considerable plasticity exists." This means that when Brianne watches TV, her brain is being wired to respond to visual stimulation and multiple visual exposures simultaneously. It's like a "smorgasbord for the senses" with an overload of visual and audio stimulation that parents and teachers often can't compete with — unless they create a three-ring circus for communication.

As Brianne grows up, if she has a difficult time focusing on her mother when she's talking, or listening to her teacher, Suzanne may take the advice of Jane M. Healy, an educational psychologist and turn the TV off. Dr. Healy says that many parents she's counseled noticed significant improvement in their ADD child when their television viewing privileges were removed.4

Parents with teens should be equally concerned. Study results released in 2007 by the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons along with the New York State Psychiatric Institute showed that teens who watch three or more hours of television a day may have a higher risk for attention deficit and learning difficulties as they enter adulthood. Teens in the study who watched the most TV were more likely to get bored, neglect their homework, score poor grades, fail to graduate from high school, and experience academic failure more frequently in their post-secondary education.5

Can TV Hinder Reading Scores and Other Educational Development?

According to EA Vandewater, a physician at the University of Texas, when kids are part of a family where the TV is constantly on, they will spend less time reading or having someone read to them. Therefore, they are more unlikely to be able to read themselves.6

Some researchers even believe that an exposure to TV can affect a child's reading scores — not just because it can take away time from reading, but because television rewires how the brain processes information. Dr. Healy says that the visual nature of stimulus "blocks development of left-hemisphere language circuitry."7 Not only can language learning be blocked, other learning can be blocked as well.

In her book, Opening Your Child's Nine Learning Windows, Cheri Fuller examines nine learning windows that children are born with: language, musical, logical, mathematical, curiosity, emotional, spiritual, physical, and values. Mrs. Fuller agrees with experts who say that there is a prime time and critical time to develop each "window," because of heightened brain plasticity and brain connections that are being formed.

For example, a child who wants to learn a foreign language is most easily able to do so before age seven. Additionally, none of the "learning windows" are open past puberty. This means that for Brianne to develop into an inquisitive, thinking and discriminating adult, Suzanne needs to expose her daughter to activities that stimulate her brain while she's young.

Paul Copperman concurs. In his book, The Literacy Hoax, he writes: "Consider what a child misses during the 15,000 hours (from birth to age 17) he spends in front of the TV screen. He is not working in the garage with his father, or in the garden with his mother. He is not doing homework, or reading, or collecting stamps. He is not cleaning his room, washing the supper dishes or cutting the lawn. He is not listening to a discussion about community politics among his parents and their friends. He is not playing baseball or going fishing or painting pictures. Exactly what does television offer that is so valuable it can replace these activities that transform an impulsive, self-absorbed child into a critically-thinking adult?"8

*(Note: Referrals to Web sites not produced by Focus on the Family are for informational purposes only and do not necessarily constitute an endorsement of the sites' content.)

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