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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."
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
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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...
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?
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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.
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?).
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.
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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?
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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.
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.
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.
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