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Doctors Recommend Against TV For Kids Under 2
An anonymous reader writes "The American Academy of Pediatrics has issued a recommendation to parents that kids under the age of two should be limited in their time watching television and using computers. They say there's 'no such thing' as educational programming for kids that young, and that they benefit much more from real human interaction (PDF). Psychologist Georgene Troseth said, 'We know that some learning can take place from media, but it's a lot lower, and it takes a lot longer.' The article continues: 'Unlike school-age children, infants and toddlers "just have no idea what's going on" no matter how well done a video is, Dr. Troseth said. The new report strongly warns parents against putting a TV in a very young child's room and advises them to be mindful of how much their own use of media is distracting from playtime. In some surveys between 40 and 60 percent of households report having a TV on for much of the day — which distracts both children and adults, research suggests.'"
I think most of TV is below the 2 year-old mentality.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXV-yaFmQNk
Do you laugh or do you weep for the future.
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
My 2 year old daughter loves ( L - O - V - E - S - !) the Fiest 1,2,3,4 Sesame Street video and has watched it since she was a little younger than 1. She dances and sings and it has never gotten old. In the beginning she was so enamoured with it, it was like watching those old movies of Beatles fans grasping their heads and shrieking with delight. She'd wave at the characters and definitely was interpretting it right from the start. It had less than 7 million hits a year ago, and at 14 million and counting, I am sure she is not the only fan.
Introducing music to kids is great and I'd add that its fun for me to do too.. I'd have to say that this is different than plugging her into a TV set to watch the eye-candy slackjawed n drooling and I noted the ADHD link with fast edit kids media recently It is a much more interactive thing where she picks her favourite videos to watch as a treat. We talk about the characters and animals and sometimes do drawings after. Another favorite is a Woody Guthrie classic and we sing it together sometimes. She digs the iPad since she can click on suggested videos at the end of one... OF course it is a supervise activity.
I recommend against TV for children under 99.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Of course, he's a kitten, and he probably just sees the motions anyway, but did you really think I'd had a baby? Here, a slashdot poster?
Apparently not a very alert /.er. Only slow cats can see something resembling an image, the rest see a moving dot of light (for those with CRTs) or just a flickering stutter for slower LCDs.
There's other links out there for those that thought their "bright" animal watched TV. It certainly explained why the cat was never bothered by silent cats on TV, but had the shock of his life walking around the corner and seeing himself in the new full length mirror. Poof! Twice his normal size. :)
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
The AAP has always been extremely conservative when it comes to children and TV. No surprise about the new findings here. As always, you have to take these findings with a huge grain of salt. Apply common sense and your kids will be fine. I know that mine are even though they watched a boat-load of TV when they were still toddlers (what kid would not appreciate a bit of Sesame Street or The Wiggles?). Now they are in elementary school and way too busy to watch anything and they are a-okay with that.
Back in the day, parents would keep kids sequestered in playpens so that parents could get chores done easier. While TV is probably not the best answer, is there ever a good answer to distracting kids so you can do laundry, make food, take a shower or other necessary tasks?
This is just nonsense.
My son wouldn't talk till he was over 2 years old. We were starting to worry. Then he discovered Thomas the Tank Engine. Suddenly he wanted to say the names of the engines and he learnt his colours too. That led to shapes. At 3 he's now on to identifying numbers on the sides of the engines, he's got an incredible imagination. With no prompting he drew a passable clown face on his face when momentarily left alone with a texter (and showed how he'd close his eyes when he was warned that he could poke his eyes out). He's been to the circus exactly twice. I'll bet he got that from TV. He knows some letters because he's learnt H is for horn for example when we play Trainz with Thomas characters, or that you hit W to go forward. He has limited mouse and keyboard skills but his comprehension impresses me. He goes to preschool now so that's helping his social development. He is not allowed to sit there and do nothing but watch TV. My wife plays and draws and bakes cookies and everything else you would expect a young child do.
My daughter's developing speech sooner. She's not 18 months old yet but she's asking for certain objects with abbreviated words "bub" for bubble etc. She loves TV shows too. She usually prefers to watch with her brother and she's a very social little creature indeed.
Young children may not have the skills to understand at high level concepts, but they sure as hell can follow a kids TV show. And as long as it's not all they do, I think it's very important to their development.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
it trains your mind to be led by something other than your mind itself.
so even if television wasnt full of violence and myriad sexual innuendis (which it is), but instead filled only with decent people doing decent things, it would still exert a tremendous and unquantifiable amount of damage to the normal healthy mental fitness of any human cognitive enough to interpret any part of its message at any basic level.
i hate to say it but technology has dehumanized humanity. many have seen it pervading the social fabric already, decades ago. they were ridiculed and derided by people much like myself until a few years ago when the evidence became too overwhelming for me to continue living a lie.
our society is now filled with people that cannot concentrate on anything important for too long, seldom dwell on any actually important topic, and have very little desire to muse on anything. we all want fast paced, lots of colors, quick shallow messages that can be digested without any heavy mental thought given.
i am reading a book right now that echos my feelings on this far better than i can articulate. it is called 'high tech heretic' by clifford stoll (better known for his non fiction book 'the cuckoos egg' when he tracked down hackers that were working for the kgb and were breaking into the vms / bsd box's at his university decades ago)
Given she managed to open/turn pages in both magazines I think she understands them pretty well. The grabby hand movements don't seem strange, babies like feeling things. The only strange thing in the video is that the baby doesn't try to taste the magazine or the iPad.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
You call apples lawyers and inform them those magazines are deceptively ripping off the ipad's design and they should have the court halt their shipments until things are sorted out.
Just wondering. TV isn't just bad for babies.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Everyone has been exposed to TV since Howdy Doody and Clarabel the Clown. What the study shows is that human contact and caring - WITH or WITHOUT television - is goodness. If you substitute TV for empty room, good. Substitute TV for siblings fighting in living room, ok. Substitute TV for caring interactive parents? Bad, Maybe?
Gently reply
Not sure I believe this, as the only show my cat likes is Fringe, which she watches religiously.
Who is John Cabal?
ADD is the logical consequence of doing everything ever faster. It is not caused by TV as such, but rather by the way the world has changed.
We used to have the middle ages, where everything significant done was thought over probaby 50 years at the very least.
Then we went from "water + green sparkly stone heats up" to nuclear power plants (with a detour to the bomb) in about 15 years.
Then things accelerated and technology advanced, so cost decreased to the point where 10 year planning was enough to travel to the moon.
We went from 1 baud to ~150 Tb/sec with roughly the same amount of minds behind it, in about 40 years, rising exponentially year-over-year.
Now things are accelerated to the point that we plan for a few hours, a few weeks, maybe a few months for the really, really big projects.
And "strangely" this results in a short attention span ... how is this a surprise ? How exactly do you think our brains would adapt ? It is physically impossible (in non-geological timespans) to get any smarter, so what was the brain to do ? The acceleration above happened in 500 years. The last 4 in less than 100 years. The last 2 in 30 years. ADD is only the beginning, it'll expand to the point that large amounts of people do not have sufficient attention span to get anything done at all, to the point where it can rightly be called a disease.
ADD is simply a result of how we've "chosen" to run the world (perhaps more accurately : how the dollar has chosen to run the world). It will get much worse than it is today. The shortening of attention spans and the lack of depth of thought is running along an exponential curve.
ADD is the logical consequence of doing everything ever faster. It is not caused by TV as such, but rather by the way the world has changed.
We used to have the middle ages, where everything significant done was thought over probaby 50 years at the very least. Then we went from "water + green sparkly stone heats up" to nuclear power plants (with a detour to the bomb) in about 15 years. Then things accelerated and technology advanced, so cost decreased to the point where 10 year planning was enough to travel to the moon. We went from 1 baud to ~150 Tb/sec with roughly the same amount of minds behind it, in about 40 years, rising exponentially year-over-year. Now things are accelerated to the point that we plan for a few hours, a few weeks, maybe a few months for the really, really big projects.
And "strangely" this results in a short attention span ... how is this a surprise ? How exactly do you think our brains would adapt ? It is physically impossible (in non-geological timespans) to get any smarter, so what was the brain to do ? The acceleration above happened in 500 years. The last 4 in less than 100 years. The last 2 in 30 years. ADD is only the beginning, it'll expand to the point that large amounts of people do not have sufficient attention span to get anything done at all, to the point where it can rightly be called a disease.
ADD is simply a result of how we've "chosen" to run the world (perhaps more accurately : how the dollar has chosen to run the world). It will get much worse than it is today. The shortening of attention spans and the lack of depth of thought is running along an exponential curve.
How then do you explain those who can deal with the pace of modern life, including those who love and work frequently with technology and information, yet retain the ability to concentrate and focus and pay attention at will?
I have an entirely different theory. It's not a matter of something new that has recently appeared. It's a matter of something old that is no longer valued as it once was. The heightened pace of modern life merely increases the contrast, makes the nature of the problem more evident and observable. Without that, you'd have to look for it much harder before you would see it.
It's simply a matter of discipline mixed with expectation and most people grossly sell themselves short on both counts. The lack of depth is absolutely caused by the decline of personal introspection and self-evaluation, things which naturally lead to an internal embracing of the good and rewarding kind of discipline. This isn't the kind of discipline externally imposed by some authority. It is a desire to appreciate and to invest in things that are valuable and significant.
If you buy a car, you take good care of it and learn a little bit about how it works so you know how to do that. If you buy a computer, you pay attention to experienced users, you learn from your mistakes, and you do a little reading here and there so you can get the most out of it. All of that has now been shoved into the exclusive domain of experts. All of that is "too hard", which is code for "requires a small investment of effort that repeatedly pays off forever afterwards".
All of that is not passive enough, not comfortable enough for those who want to be served more than they want to help themselves. That kind of creative, relaxing "me time" would also mean you don't judge your social standing by how hectic and burn-out your schedule is, you make time for things you value more than you say "I just don't have the time". In short, that would make you a nobody, because if you were really somebody, you'd be drowning in appointments instead of bothering with things like working on your character and learning new things.
The only real change has been to what you might call a value system. The pace at which a given value system is applied is completely irrelevant.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Nonsense.
There's a fair bit of evidence to show that ADD is heritable. There's some that suggests that it has been around a lot longer than just the modern period, but that in the past there was a greater variety of work that allowed people who aren't comfortable with a 9-5 office routine to still be useful and productive.
Decrease access to certain types of work and increase the number of children who don't get to grow up with adult males who can teach and show them ways of using AD in useful ways (it's Y linked) and you are going to see more people who are 'disordered'. The 'attention deficit' part contains a large chunk of people who are just not suited to focusing on a single task for eight hours at a time and/or who aren't primarily audio/visual learners and thinkers.
Perhaps calling your argument 'nonsense' is going too far - social change has resulted in more people exhibiting 'symptoms', but it's not some kind of adaption or reaction to the rate of change.
Sufficient genetic deviation in the population should allow such people to exist. If these people are successful breeders relative to the ADD folks, then, Darwins law of evolution shall explain the rest for you.
Darwinism doesn't apply when the penalty for stupidity (i.e. lack of fitness) is less than death or at least, sterilization.
Darwinism in that classic sense hasn't applied to human beings for a very long time because of technologically improved production capabilities, social safety nets, and modern medicine. Please don't offer explanations based on things you clearly don't understand.
It's particularly shallow to offer a genetic explanation in a one-size-fits-all manner in response to my post about nurture and voluntary decision-making.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
. . . another year to use the computer, you are out of your fucking mind!
The corners aren't rounded, I think the magazines might have a slim chance.
The US government have made it clear that we have no inalienable rights; any we do not defend vigorously will be taken.
There's a fair bit of evidence to show that ADD is heritable
True, but it doesn't actually contradict my argument. You're falling for the fallacy of the inverted consequence :
A -> B, therefore it must be that B -> A. *Bzzzt* not true.
Every genetic effect is heritable. But because an effect is heritable does *not* mean it is genetic. Religion is almost exclusively heritable (yes even given the supposedly massive shift to atheism, which is in reality but a pathetic trickle), yet it is not genetic, to give but one obvious example.
When a couple only produce one child and this child only has one child in coupling with another only child, the relative amount of their DNA in the gene pool diminishes. Compared this to their neighbour, who produces three offspring every generation. It's simple enough to create a proof by induction that you have either not understood what I wrote, or, that you have no idea what you are talking about... please refrain from posting rubbish.
To suggest that this is due to "nature running its course", based on competition, with the end of making the objectively fittest thrive as implied by Darwinism and any notion of natural selection, and not at all influenced or if you will, perverted, by the flaws in those artificial constructs we call societies, is simply absurd.
Thus the notion of who breeds more eventually becomes who makes poorer decisions. You wind up with situations where the smart, careful, responsible, prudent people who take the time to attain an education, establish a career, form a healthy marriage, own a home, and then have only the children they can financially and emotionally afford to properly raise are disadvantaged. Instead of quality, it becomes a race for quantity. So those who recklessly have sex without birth control when they are absolutely not ready to have a baby multiply much more than those who do not.
Unless you're a big subscriber to that most puerile of justifications, known as "might makes right", you have to notice something there is not as it would naturally be, if there were a struggle for survival as Darwinism assumes. That means we are talking about something other than Darwinism. Having established that, let's recognize it and move on to something that might work. No need to play word games with what "Darwinism" means, like some lawyer, to force the square peg into a round hole because it means you get your way.
The hinge of this whole turn you've decided was best for the thread is the notion of "fitness" and what that means. You've decided to twist it to mean "whatever happens to be common" with no sign of an appreciation of how and why it became common. Then you offer this "breeding contest" type of response to my comment which was about personal decision-making and willingness to assume responsibility, something that is "nurture" and not "nature" if you insist on dividing the two.
So alright, tell me I don't understand what you did there. If you think I'm personally insulting you by asking you not to post about what you do not understand, then okay, repeat my own format to mock me, only substitute "rubbish" for "things you clearly don't understand" like a variable in a formula. You really want to prove my point for me about shallow responses to things, don't you?
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
You are perhaps right, but I have ADD and I am both introspective and attached to long-term goals which I have no qualms about following. However, without stimulant medication I simply can't keep long enough threads of thought to (say) study (or even play videogames well) and the medication does nothing about the high-level executive dysfunction causing me to have a really low intuitive ability to break down tasks into pieces leading to sometimes rather slapstick behaviour (think "absent-minded professor").
You and other posters make it sound like it's some sort of problem put upon me by my surroundings, but I haven't had any greater exposure to strong or varied stimuli than my siblings or friends, none of which have my problems. And my personality isn't of the kind that readily gives in to petty societial demands either.
It's possible that what you're describing is a general attitude in society rather than the actual medical condition, but the two shouldn't be confused.
Emotions! In your brain!
How then do you explain those who can deal with the pace of modern life, including those who love and work frequently with technology and information, yet retain the ability to concentrate and focus and pay attention at will?
It's an illusion that you can do those things as well as you think you can.
http://www.physorg.com/news170349575.html
"People who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information do not pay attention, control their memory or switch from one job to another as well as those who prefer to complete one task at a time, a group of Stanford researchers has found."
With the first link, the chain is forged.
It's quite another to be so completely stuck in one and only one form of learning that you are completely dysfunctional in any other. It's a choice one makes and it's really that simple.
I agree and as someone capable of the meta-cognition necessary to recognise my own preferred learning methods and to adapt to the ones being offered, I understand the value of that choice.
And also how few people are equipped to recognise it, let alone make it.
I am not sure of your educational background, but I was certainly never taught to think about thinking. That was something that a fortunate combination of aptitude and circumstance allowed me to develop on my own. I'm far from unique, but equally, I am far from common.
I'm certainly not comfortable condemning those who both lack the ability to live comfortably in the world as it is and who also lack the means to recognise how they might change that. Doubly damned, to be sure.
I acknowledge that there are those who play the victim and who demand sympathy and/or consideration for their lack of effort but that's not the whole story.
No one sought to teach me to think about thinking either.
I'm simply not one of the passive sheeple who waits for someone else to hand out knowledge and understanding. I am my own person. By trying to understand myself, I understand the world around me. By trying to understand the world around me, I understand myself. Between the two, I discover things about how processes such as learning work and I pay attention as they unfold in front of me.
I know you didn't mean it this way, but the idea that I would be helplessly dependent on a teacher or a professor or a parent to figure this out is nearly insulting.
If others have a conception of themselves that is lower than this, and sell themselves short, that is up to them.
You say you are far from common. In a way, you're right. Just understand that this is not the natural order of things. A great many financial and political interests had to work for their mutual benefits in order to dumb the world down to where you and I are the oddballs. We're the ones on which the training in helplessness didn't take. But the human being as an organism does need to be trained to be that way. It is not how we otherwise would be.
It is a hard thing to be sure, but it falls under "tough love" to say that those who "lack the means to recognize how they might change that" merely haven't become tired enough of the way things are. They still dream of the path of least resistance, and so long as they entertain that notion, they invite and welcome with open arms that horrible "double damnation" you describe.
Self-awareness and a real love of truth and reason is not for the faint of heart. The faint of heart wouldn't remain that way on their own. It has to be inculcated and portrayed as normal.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein