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TV, ADHD and Doing Useful Things
WebGangsta writes "USAToday (and others) are reporting that too much TV, at an early age, can cause ADHD in children. They say that there should be no TV watching for children under 2. Every added hour of watching TV increased a child's odds of having attention problems by about 10%. Kids watching about three hours a day were 30% more likely to have attention trouble than those viewing no TV. The researchers accounted for many factors beside television that might predict problems concentrating, but the TV-attention link remained. I imagine that in 10 years we'll be seeing studies about how too much Internet/computer/video game use will also result in ADHD. See PEDIATRICS magazine for more information."
Uh, what?
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
The poster means an hour a day, on average. The very next sentence says that watching three hours per day was linked to a 30% increase in the likelyhood of developing ADHD.
However it is just one more desiease that can be added to the list of "modern desiease caused by humans".
You're old school? I beta tested the motherf***ing abacus!
The difference really is that television is aimed at consumers, and consumers are really at heart people with ADHD with lots of money to spend. Video games on the other hand are an involved activity, no more dangerous than solving the Junior Jumble or pushing blocks through holes - provided that you give the children children's software. Don't let your kid end up like this.
--Stephen
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
The paper doesn't actually claim a causal relationship:
"Early television exposure is associated with attentional problems at age 7. Efforts to limit television viewing in early childhood may be warranted, and additional research is needed." (my italics, from the abstract)
Without any evidence of a causal pathway it could be that, eg the constantly changing images are appealing to children who eventually develop ADHD. There have also been studies showing that children watching television in preschool has a beneficial effect on their teenage school performance.
Given conflicting advice, surely parents should follow the advice of their doctors or health board and not jump on the first research bandwagon that rolls through town.
I imagine that in 10 years we'll be seeing studies about how too much Internet/computer/video game use will also result in ADHD
I don't think that's a fair extrapolation. If "the Internet" is going to cause ADHD, then I suppose "reading books" will too. Or "folding paper". Origami is creating a nation of obese ADHD'ers!
Internet use is sometimes like TV - but it also involves reading, decision-making, and much more concentration. Maybe it'll lead to a generation of smart kids with balanced lives?
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
But it got boring so I looked at my fingers for a while and forgot what I'd been doing in the first place. Then I saw some lint on the desk and cleaned it up for a few seconds...
What were we talking about again?
I'd like to see this study done on Adults.
I don't know if it's more of a cause or effect, but anecdotal personal experience shows a trend that the more in tune with the TV an adult is (knows scheduling, can talk about specific episodes of all their favorite shows) the shorter and less rewarding a conversation with them is is likely to be.
While on the other hand, the folks that I know who are very discriminating television watchers can hold an in depth conversation, stick to topic, and not get impatient.
Sort of a chicken and egg question with adults. Do these anecdotal adults with a greater attention span enjoy TV less and so are much more discerning with that they watch? Or do they have a greater attention span because it hasn't been stunted by the flashing box?
Operator, give me the number for 911!
Without knowing what the base rate is ("How likely is a 2 year old to develop ADHD in the future?"), it's impossible to do any sort of real risk assesment on "your kid will be 30% more likely to develop ADHD if they watch 3 hours of TV a day".
In the fearfest that's going to follow this, that figure will probably be conflated in the public mind to "you child has a 30% chance of developing ADHD if they watch 3 hours of TV a day", which is not what it's saying at all.
However, I live with a 3rd grader that has been diagnosed with ADHD and has been taking a medication for it for two years now. If anything, the kid watches more TV now than before, simply because he can now sit still for longer. I wasn't there when he was a toddler, but his mom says that he hardly ever watched TV because he was too busy bouncing off the walls, going from one activity to the next.
Most of these diseases seem to affect upwardly mobile, two wage earner families where the children are shuttled from day care to school to day care to learning center, because the parents are too selfish and too greedy to make a financial sacrifice to have the wife stay home with the children. I'm not the only one to think this, a leading news site is also revealing the backlash against self-indulgent lazy parents.
How often are children whose parents have taken the time to teach them how to read (rather than rely on poorly paid wage drones of the state who are marking their time to tenure) diagnosed with dyslexia? Not very often. But, if you tell these yuppies that they have to miss watching Tiger Woods and sound out letters and words with their little carpet ape, they get upset, they'd rather have burnt out professionals deal with their children. A word of warning, these same professional's will be promoting elder care, and when the parents get too inconvenient, it's off to a warehouse, and spending the rest of your golden years lying on rubber sheets in pools or urine and feces.
ADD: The only attention deficit here is the one parents owe to their children. Maybe stay home with your spawn a few nights a weeka and interact with them, rather than pawn them off on whatever exploited minimum wage caretakers you could fine.
RSI: Well, monks used their hands and got little sleep for centuries, and they never complained. Perhaps a faith based initiative should be pursued.
Anorexia/bulimia: That hunger that never gets filled is not a hunger for food, dearies.
Besides as already noted they show correlation but not causation (despite the fact they try real hard to imply it), they don't even use a valid measure of ADD. They use a measure of hyperactivity. Hyperactivity is not ADD. ADD can occur with or without hyperactivity, and hyperactivity can be due to other than ADD.
It is well known that kids with ADD, even with hyperactivity, can sit and focus on active things for long periods of time (TV, video games, etc.). It is far more likely that lots of TV watching can be a sign of burgeoning ADD symptoms (or a very busy parent).
Anyone interested in what ADD is and isn't should read chapters 9 and 10 in Diane McGuiness's book "When Children Don't Learn". She pretty much tears a new one into the present tendency to diagnose any kid with any problems as having ADD.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
I need to lookup where I heard this first, but there was a study done back in the 70's (I think) about the correlation of attention span and television.
The findings suggested that TV causes shortened attention spans by physically altering pathways in the brain. The effect is similar to muscle memory (you can all type your 28 character password in 1.5 seconds without needing to actually look at the keyboard, right? That's muscle memory.) and can either be reinforced by watching lots of TV or reduced by not watching TV and reading books instead. Because the nature of the medium of television is such that topical changes occur very fast (approx every 30 seconds) and more or less without end (until you turn it off), you are physically training the brain to deal with shortened periods of time on which to concentrate. This might explain why after watching MTV for a few minutes you might find yourself saying "my brain hurts!!!"
With children, this is especially problematic because the habits (physical and otherwise) they form will be with them forever. If they *learn* to have a 30 second attention span through the dominant medium in their life, then they will will end up having great difficulty concentrating for periods of time longer than what is normally required of them. Consequense? They are diagnosed as "having ADHD" (which I think is just a scam invented by shrinks and the drug companies... why discipline or educate your child when you can say they are 'disabled' and just medicate them instead?).
This is completely false. When I was a tiny baby, my dad watched sports and he would seat me next to him to watch sports on TV.
What was I talking about again? I love sports. Wait, was I talking about sports or TV?
I think SportsCenter is on. Bye.
Everyone is making a fundamental but somehow questioned assumption here:
That the change in children is bad, and the lack of focus on rudimentary tasks is bad.
I see it the other way, we are more used to sensory input. As a result the mundane bores us more. Yes sometimes when I should be focusing I'm not, but that's because it's so _boring_. Nobody is measuring how many tasks I can pay attention to at once, and no one is measuring how well I can focus in these situations.
I've noticed this difference between generations between myself and my dad using a computer. He can't tolerate more than one window open at a time, just gets confused. On the other hand I have between 10-30 different windows running on at least two screens at all times, not including vnc sessions into other boxes.
However in the machine that the public school system is supposed to be - cranking out automatons that must be satisfied with their jobs no matter what - require people to pay attention to boring things. For example manufacturing and retail jobs. This is the philosophy that public schools have followed for a very long time. Perhaps the information overload at an early age is countering this conditioning, I like it.
"I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." George HW Bush
I don't necessarily disagree that these "diseases" are over-hyped, but I don't think there's much question that they exist. Just because a condition has a treatment or behavior that can mitigate it doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.
Does berry-berry not exist because people could get more Thayamine and drink less alocohol?
Does scurvy not exist because people could get more Vitamine C?
I suppose malaria doesn't exist, only people stupid enough to live where there are mosquitoes?
Twit.
TV shows for children, for marketing reasons, have to cater to a pretty low denominator for attention span. TV networks have done their studies about optimum topic length for ad revenue, most likely, so this conflict of interest is not in the interest of our children.
Worse than TV alone is leaving the TV on while trying to do other things with children. Sitting down to do a puzzle or a game with a child while the TV is on and in line of sight is just hopeless. He/She is frequently looking towards the TV, because the constant change in images is so distracting.
During an early age, when the brain is still developing, how can TV not be screwing up our children?
Vote in November. You won't regret it.
I imagine that in 10 years we'll be seeing studies about how too much Internet/computer/video game use will also result in ADHD
I doubt you'll have to wait that long.
Are Computer, Video and Arcade Games Affecting Children's Behavior? An Empirical Study
Parent post brought to you courtesy of the SJ Reality Distortion Field (TM)
Laugh. it's funny.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
BS for 2 reasons
1) As being gifted with ADHD type thing for longer than they new what to call it. and my parents denied me TV until I was 7.
2) My father has the same issues, so does my half sister and her kids.
I think TV just makes everyone dumb.
This perpetual motion machine Lisa made is a joke, it just keeps getting faster and faster. - Homer
..anyone wanna go ride bikes?
The / in
I am a psychologist who works for a school district. I cannot speak for all of my peers, but I can address my experiences/observations. Some children are signficantly less attentive and more active than their same-age, same-gender classmates in the same situation. The causal factors are of course hotly debated, but I think it is silly to debate the existence of ADHD. IMO it is not frequently overdiagnosed, but I do believe that it is often over-medicated. To some degree, we need to appreciate that some kids function in this manner, and they need to learn compensatory and adaptive skills to cope with it so that they can function in the "real world." Despite this difficulty.
Well, as far as Sig's go, Freud was a doozy.
That's funny, really. They must've forgotten to include this:
Every hour of watching per day (on average) tends to raise a kid's chances of ADHD by 10%, for small amounts of watching. If this law doesn't break down for more hours, then one makes the physically impossible conclusion that watching 25 hours of TV per day makes one 250% as likely to develop ADHD, or 2.5 times as likely. Is there a "cap" of 2.4 times as likely, then? We're going into MOD 24 hours somehow?
Methinks there's a nonlinear relationship hidden in there, somehow, and that things have got to break down for more than 3-4 hours of watching per day. This is good (a "softening potential" of developing ADHD. But is it good enough?
The scaling represented must go something like:
Probability of developing ADHD as a function of hours of TV per day = P[x] (where x is in hours);
P[x] = k*P[0]*x , where P[0] is the "normal" probability of a kid who doesn't watch ANY TV to develop ADHD, and k is a (constant) proportionality factor.
One gets nonsensical results if k is large enough that increasing x enough gives P[x]/P[0] > 1. Thus, I propose that k is a function of x, such that k[x] "softens", or k[x] has a downward curvature for larger x ( or d^2(k[x])/dx^2 0 ).
Perhaps taking this way out of proportion (pun somewhat intended), but this is BAD reporting at the very least, and probably bad science.
and reading the slashdot-summary, I just wanted to say that it may not be 'watching TV per say' that's bad ... but it would lie more in 'what you are watching'.
Has anyone done in-depth studies about what 'content' might or might not do?
I don't claim I know more than I know, and if you know you know more than I know, then by all means, let me know.
> Too many people are watching TV ... these same people ... don't like Bush
What, eating the three Billy Goats Gruff wasn't enough for you? You're still hungry?
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Liberal TV? Sweet! Where can I find some liberal TV?
I'm getting tired of Fox, Time Warner, and the big networks anyway...
I never had television growing up, and do not have one now. I'm appalled at all the mongoloid potato babies I see everywhere. Remember, these kids are the future. (A future of hyperactivity, selfishness, and drool.)
One future, two choices. Oppose them or let them destroy us.
Is it just me, or is ADD becoming just like laziness and obesity, in that researchers find that everyone (at least in America) has it?
Glog!
I've never heard of civilization being defined in terms of agriculture. The definitions of civilization that I'm familiar with (and I took a lot of cultural geography classes, so I've got a good background for this) are concerned with urbanization. The tie-in, however, is pretty obvious in that agriculture is what makes cities trivially possible. (Other possibilities exist for the creation of cities, but agriculture is most common and is the easiest one)
Of course, defining civilization in terms of urbanization is really rather a western thing. In China civilization is defined in terms of written language (wen2 hua4 or wen2 ming2, where wen = writing or literacy).
Writing is what defines a people as civilized to the Chinese mind, not cities. Historically, almost every government bureaucrat was a passable poet, and all the most famous poets were goverment officials. That's no coincidence! But such a thing is virtually unheard of in the west.
Government IS the problem.
This article is based upon the assumption that such a condition as ADHD even exists, which is under scrutiny. Even proponents of the psy sciences question it existence other than job security for both psy doctors and pharmaceutical companies.
...we are from the government - we are here to help...
While I did grow up watching a hefty amount of cartoons, I was also absorbed into educational TV, such as PBS and Discovery Channel, and lots of cooking shows. We never watched sports at my house just because nobody (not even Dad) found any entertainment value in sports. The end results: I'm a total geek who loves to cook! Aside from that, I may be a little ADHD myself, but I never was pinned down and medicated or psychoanalyzed. I just had good parents who were attentive to my needs. When they saw I was restless, they sent me outside to ride on my bike for the afternoon. When they saw I was bored, they would give me something fun to do. I would wager that there is a connection between ADHD and poor parenting. Perhaps a study should be done on the moms and dads of ADHD children, analyzing their choices in how to raise their children. The numbers there might be a bit more staggering.
"Would you rather be right, or happy?"
I recall that as a kid watched a lot of tv. I also did a lot of non tv things (Legos rule) as there was only so much per day for kids to watch in the 70s. In fact i dare say i watch more tv now then i ever did as a kid, including more toons. I guess im just not seeing the problem here. I recall several occasions in which i stayed home from school to watch PBS as school was way too boring.
So where do I fall into this vast tv wasteland people have been whining about since the 50s?
Every added hour of watching TV increased a child's odds of having attention problems by about 10%.
I feel sorry for the kids who watch 13 hours worth... they're definately screwed.
I'm less inclined to believe that TV is to blame, and more inclined to believe it's caused by a known neurological toxin, like low levels of mercury (a great deal of which comes from coal burning plants, by the way).
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
... so it sure ain't a pre-requisite. And out of all of the characteristics of ADHD I have seen listed anywhere, he has 18 out of 18, or 14 out of 14 or whatever the particular list says.
He's six and a half now, and the total TV he's seen in his life is probably less than a month (we're not anal about it - we just don't want one in our home).
On those occasions when he has watched TV for any length of time, it totally locks him in, and he can become very uncivilised, which he normally isn't.
I don't think the lack of TV has been a bad thing, at all, either: although he couldn't read when he started school at five, six months later his reading age was eleven.
Indeed, it is the content of the TV, rather then Tv itself which causes the attention to switch off. Either the subject is only interesting for 1 or 2 mins, or the 'plot' is such that the storyline can only be followed for such a shot time before a)the writers attention breaks down, and the story wanders away, or b)the plot is interrupted by a commercial break. When TV was more sedate, and less 'buy this' oriented, the content would be more likely to bore you stiff- but ADD; ADHD; or whatever hadn't become fashionable then..
...and he grinned, like a fox eating shit out of a wire brush.
Affected.
Affects.
When used as a verb, "effect" means "to start," or "to initiate"; "affect" means "to change". In both cases, you meant "change" (I assume).
People should always remember: Correlation != Causality
/not/ teach them to concentrate.
While the article doesn't argue causality, its conclusions do support limiting kids' time in front of the TV (suggesting reversability), and every idiot journalist will take it that way.
It reminds me of a research article a few years ago showing that kids who didn't get breakfast didn't do well at school, so millions were spent enabling school cafeterias to serve breakfasts. When the results were in a few years later it became clear this had had little effect. The actual relationship was that parents who can't be bothered to feed their kids also don't make sure they study.
Similarly here, I suggest that parents who can't be arsed interacting with their kids will (a) dump them in front of the telly and (b) thereby
Hence just taking the TV away won't help much...
Justin.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
On the subject of ADHD, it's important to realize that....
Next we can tell all of the diabetics that insulin is just a crutch for the weak. They should just get up off their lazy butts and deal with their problems.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Your "me and my father, half sister, and her kids" dataset isn't statistically significant.
Here's a lesson from my life: Hondas are statistically reliable. Mine has needed transmission service nine times in less than 40K miles. Does my single example mean Hondas are unreliable overall? No. It means I'm the rare example, and an unlucky son of a bitch with an unreliable civic.
Just remember "but it didn't happen that way for me" isn't a valid argument against somebody who did a controlled study with a large dataset. You need more than a single datapoint from your own life.
The reason that these middle class children are being diagnosed with ADHD and similar conditions is not because their parents are lazy.
.
The parents have an obligation to maintain their family - frequently three kids and two sets of parents. That is no small feat - even for a two wage earning household.
My parents fall into your so called "yuppie" classification. They also sent me to public school. Despite that, they found the time in their busy academics' schedules to teach me to read. In addition, my primary school education was far from second rate. In fact, I score exceptionally highly on english language, verbal, and reading comprehension exams. I am the counterproof to your argument
Those who cannot afford to take time off from work to spend with their children are not going have their children diagnosed as ADHD. Such families would not be able to afford the great medical costs associated with treating a psychological disorder, nor would they have the time to pursue a positive diagnosis against the will of their first doctor.
There is no more correlation between the more socially mobile classes and ADD than there is between hours of TV watched and ADHD diagnoses. The causality is wrong in your arguments.
I'm not going to bother commenting on your anorexia/bulimia remark any more than this: that is truly insolent remark.
I am posting this under my own name not to incite argument and "troll" throwing but to give credibility to my assertions and the facts I mentioned in this post. If you respect varying opinions and sound logic, mod this post up. If you are indifferent to reason, simply ignore it.
So we will define diabetes as secreting excessive sugar via the kidneys. Diabetes has many associated symptoms including blindness, lack of energy, bladder infections, eventual kidney failure, poor circulattion etc but we'll stick with sugar in the urine as the definition of diabetes.
At some point someone found, by testing a diabetics blood that high blood sugar was associated with diabetes.
It seems reasonable that high blood sugar causes diabetes ( sugar in the urine ), since the kidneys filter the blood, but that would need to be tested to be proven by say supercharging a healthy mouse's bloodstream with glucose solution and looking for it in the urine. Then you would know that high blood sugar causes diabetes.
But some diabetics take insulin. How do we know that lack of insulin causes diabetes? There have been people that lost their pancreases. Those people lose their ability to make insulin ( you can test for insulin ) and invariably develop type I diabetes. Giving them artificial insulin cures their high urine and blood sugar levels. Lack of insulin causes type I diabetes - case closed.
What about type II diabetes? This is not caused by lack of insulin since people with type II diabetes have normal or higher insulin levels. But they still have diabetes. So lack of insulin is not the root cause of all diabetes. Diabetes can have at least 2 different causes including, but not limited to lack of insulin. Can we rule out that diabetes might cause lack of insulin? Yes. People with type II diabetes who still produce insulin are the proof.
The brain works via electicity and chemicals so adding electricity and/or chemicals to the brain can be expected to have an effect on it's operation and on the thoughts it thinks. But so can the environment. The photons hitting one's retina unleash a cascade of electrical activity causing cells in the brain to communicate via neurotransmitters ( chemicals ). The same can be said for the other 4 senses. So the environment, or even one's own thoughts ( and it gets hairy when we talk about "one's own thoughts" because you can't really separate the software from the hardware it runs on ) effect, and are identical with the brain's electrical and chemical state.
Adding a drug to a brain is like trying to fix a computer infected with a virus by treating the '1 deficiency' of the bits on it's hard drive by flipping random 0-bits to 1's. Possibly the virus writes 0's to the drive and a preponderance of 0's on a hard drive can be associated with viral infection, but the 0's are not the cause of the infection. It's the virus itself. Maybe the usability of the computer is better in some ways after the 1-bit-flip treatment, but the data is now more corrupt than ever. Now, even removing the virus will not rid the hard drive of all the random 1's.
The brain seems to be pretty flexible with regards to corruption whether from a knock to the skull or from a drug like alcohol or tobacco, or even crack. Adding random molecules to the brain may confuse it into thinking it's been cured for a while but as soon as the brain adapts the patient will complain about the fact that they feel the same as before ( drug tolerance ) and then they will be issued another drug. Like an addict, the person never faces their problems - choosing, in good consience to take the drugs prescribed by their well respected doctor. How is a kid to learn that it is in their best interest to curb behaviors associated with hyperactivity if they never feel disposed to act out unless they are 'off their meds'. Seeing medication as a substitute for self control or meeting personal goals is a dangerous spiral.
Eat at Joe's.
I've been watching T.V. for my entire life and I don't have ADH.... hey look at that puppy over there.
I watched tons of TV, and I can say that not only did it not.....
OOOH! Shiny......
--
"Insert witty quote here."
I think the really telling point for psychiatric drugs is that they will either reduce symptoms, do nothing, or worsen the symptoms. With continued use, their dose may have to be increased, decreased, or they may begin to have the opposite effect and need to be discontinued. This is from the medical literature.
There are no established tests to determine what will happen or to determine if or when the effect may reverse. Meanwhile, sudden withdrawal can be a disaster.
In other words, we know they do something, but their use is nearly as scientific as whacking the TV on it's side to restore vertical hold.
There can be little doubt that antidepressants (not a very accurate name) can be quite helpful to some people when little else works, but the 'information' in the commercials is dumbed down enough to be outright deception.
At the same time, we know that for some people, the best way to become happy is to act happy. YES, acting happy when you're not can cause you to become happy.
Another way that many people can become happy is to reduce stress and get enough sleep. I know that if I cut my sleep too short for too long, I tend to get depressed, A full night's sleep or two fixes it right up every time. I wonder how many people drag themselves up every morning still trying to sleep, go to their stressful and unsatisfying job, and take anti-depressants to 'cure' the 'mysterious' 'chemical imbalance' in their brains.
It's quite easy to tell if sleep is adequate. If you routinely wake up because the alarm went off, you're not getting enough. With adequate sleep, you will tend to be awake (not necessarily alert and out of bed, but at least awake) BEFORE the alarm goes off most of the time.
So, to the grandparent poster, it's more like saying "If you wouldn't eat 5 pounds of sugar 3 times a day, you might not need so much insulin".
I have myldly ADHD, but I never watched TV when I was young (I still het my father for that
I have ADD (not ADHD, not hyperactive, just short attention span) and there's a lot of anectodal evidence that it may be genetic - ie. a child is diagnosed with ADD/ADHD, one of the parents reads the screening test and recognizes it in him/her self. Certainly ADD/ADHD might provide an evolutionary advantage which is mostly stifled in today's modern world - consider creativity.
People with ADD/ADHD-type behaviors tend to "collect" each other, snowballing, because we naturally keep each other from being bored. And most of the people I know with ADD/ADHD behaviors like to watch a lot of television for its constant effortless stimulation.
So let's go on the assumption, for the moment, that ADD/ADHD is genetic in nature: one or both of the parents may have it. And the other assumption that people with ADD/ADHD like to watch television. It's not a big leap for us to guess, then, that maybe these parents knew that they liked TV and so let the kids watch a lot of TV.
If this is the case, then lots of TV in childhood is more likely symptomatic of the parents' ADD/ADHD behaviors, and symptomatic of the child's greater chances of developing these behaviors.
This also explains people like me. I wasn't allowed to watch much TV at all as a child; neither one of my parents were big fans of TV, finding other forms of stimulation. But both of my parents show most of the symptoms of ADD.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.