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Study: Kids Under 3 Should Be Banned From Watching TV
An anonymous reader sends this quote from The Guardian:
"Doctors and government health officials should set limits, as they do for alcohol, on the amount of time children spend watching screens – and under-threes should be kept away from the television altogether, according to a paper in an influential medical journal published on Tuesday. A review of the evidence in the Archives Of Disease in Childhood says children's obsession with TV, computers and screen games is causing developmental damage as well as long-term physical harm. Doctors at the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, which co-owns the journal with the British Medical Journal group, say they are concerned."
We need to fire Big Bird.
We don't have enough laws pertaining to how we parent children. PASS MORE NOW PLEASE!
I want a government official to come to my home and verify how much TV my little girl watches every day. It's important that this happens because I'm a moron and can't control myself. I also assume you are even dumber and perhaps the best thing to do would be to just take all the children away and have the government deal with them. They could return them once they're all grown up.
I have had the chance to watch two different sets of parents raise two different sets of kids.(friends vs family)
One set watched TV had mcdonalds occasionally, played video games.
The other set all of the above was either banned or discouraged( TV watching was discouraged).
Neither group was really religious(you can count the number of times both groups went to church on one hand)
The kids with minimal TV, while not necessarily smarter are generally calmer, and listen better to their parents.
the interaction of parent and adult at the young age at this point seems to be the trick(the oldest child is 7)
As far as learning, the kids without TV are able to deal with complex puzzles(for their age at least) quite easily.
of course 4 kids 2 from each family is hardly noteworthy for standard deviation.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
TV makes you stupid. I've been saying that for years. I'm one of those people that grew up without a TV. I don't typically share this information with people (I don't like being "that guy"), but it seems relevant...
As a child, it irked me that I didn't have any context for understanding the TV shows that all my friends were watching. As a teenager, I found it difficult to fit in, since I didn't have TV to insert fashion trends and pop cultural phenomena into my consciousness.
As an adult, however, I consider my parents' choice to not have a TV in the household to be one of the best child-rearing decisions they made. Why? Hard to say, but to sum it up, I'm smarter and more motivated than my peers. Instead of anesthetizing myself on the couch with the mindless tripe you find on TV, I read books and study topics that are of interest to me. I actively seek out information about what is going on in the world, rather than having news/opinions (it's hard to separate the two, if you get such information from TV) spoon-fed to me. It amazes me that people piss away their lives watching garbage that is, as far as I can tell, designed solely to make you consume while simultaneously making you unhappy with your life.
If you have a TV near you, turn it on for a second and count the number of seconds in between scene changes (where what you are watching switches to a different camera, angle, perspective, etc.). In a lot of the media consumed by kids/teens today, that interval is often 0-5 seconds. Reflect, for a moment, on what that might do to one's capacity for attention and focus.
There is a huge disconnect between what is portrayed on television and actual reality. Since kids today are socialized primarily by the media, this ought to be cause for at least some level of concern. Whenever I see people on TV (especially the talking heads), my first thought is always "People don't look like that".
And don't get me started on advertising.
my opinions on this matter, summed up: people ought to be more discriminating when it comes to what they are willing to expose their consciousness to.
Apparently, this guy (psychologist Dr. Aric Sigman) apparently has lots of agendas...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1149207/How-using-Facebook-raise-risk-cancer.html
Not saying that TV is good for you, but sometimes you have to look at the source of this stuff and wonder how seriously to take it...
try a light beer, I find my three year old actually prefers it.
This is one of the most artful academic smackdowns I've read:
Read this as "Clinicians have no idea how to do meta-analysis. He's making this shit up".
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Children under 13 should be banned from pubic schools.
Indeed!
www.Buy-Proxy.com - A "buyer-driven" global marketplace.
Seriously though.
Government should stay the fuck out of it.
Parents should raise their children. Maybe if we did not make it free to have kids by picking up the tab for them the less responsible people would have less of them.
If they want to have the TV babysit their kids they get the kids they raise.
Give it another 30 years and Government will just take the children after birth and raise them. Can not leave it to parents to raise their own children.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
In other news, guy with no qualifications makes unqualified statements...
But the issue is controversial and his opinions and standing are questioned by Dorothy Bishop, professor of developmental neuropsychology at Oxford University who says that although this is an important topic, Sigman's paper is not "an impartial expert review of evidence for effects on health and child development". "Aric Sigman does not appear to have any academic or clinical position, or to have done any original research on this topic," she said. "His comments about impact of screen time on brain development and empathy seem speculative in my opinion, and the arguments that he makes could equally well be used to conclude that children should not read books."
I ate my sig.
Seriously though. If they want to have the TV babysit their kids they get the kids they raise.
Unfortunately, rights surrounding the raising of children can't be as simple as you think they are.
Everyone else 'gets the kids that you raised' when you do an in adequate job in preparing them for life. Certainly, not in every case, but you can probably link higher incidents of poverty, crime, teen pregnancy, and maybe a dozen more undesired outcomes of which a person's course in life was directed fairly early on in life because of poor parenting.
You stereotypers are all the same...
another data point.
I remember as a child, all the old people in the room watching football games during thanksgiving.
They are all dead now.
The football games are still televised.
Case in point. OP watched teletubbies.
When you say "less responsible", I assume you mean "poor".
But see, it's not just poor parents who turn out to be shitty parents, and society pays the bill either way.
It's possible that if parents were doing their job, we wouldn't need government to try to do something it wasn't designed to do and raise their kids for them.
To be fair to parents, though, when mom and dad both have to work full time it doesn't leave a lot of time and energy for parenting. My friends in Finland who have a couple of kids both are allowed to have extensive time off to take care of the kids without losing their jobs or income. They work for private industry, but that society puts a higher priority on raising kids, I guess. They also have a lot less violent crime (all kinds of crime, actually) and, strangely, greater social mobility than the US.
Over the past 30 years, the erosion of the middle class has also meant the erosion of all sorts of social metrics. And the one statistic that has the greatest correlation to all those declining social standards is increasing income disparity. Greater inequality, past a certain point (which we passed in the 1980s) causes just about every single measurement of a society's health.
The problem is not the government. The fact that the government is becoming the family of last resort is just a symptom. The problem is we've got an economic elite that has decided to shit on the social contract, reflected mainly in a corporate ownership class who no longer feels any connection or responsibility to society, because their "global" status has unmoored them from any particular society. They are above all that now, having broken away from any community save the community of the elite. And the rest of society is just eating each other, young ones first.
You are welcome on my lawn.
This is a fallacy. Let me help you.
(Cue cheesy 1950s documentary music.)
Mr. And Mrs. Smith live in a quiet suburban neighborhood. Mr. Smith has a decent job. Nothing special, Bob Smith just runs a computerized screw press. Mrs. Smith stays at home, watching and caring for their lovely 3 year old daughter Tiffany.
As little Tiffany grew up, she started primary school, leaving Mrs. Smith with a great deal of unused time on her hands, and a rising food bill for their growing daughter.
One day, Mrs. Smith approached Mr. Smith about the prospects of taking on a part time job. She'd still be home in time to see their daughter Tiffany come home from school, and to ensure that all the domestic chores were done, and the family would get a little spending money they could use to go on a family vacation some time. Afterall, that's what the Jones family had done.
Little did Mr and Mrs smith realize, but as the amount of consumer buying power of the median household increases, so too does the cost of various consumer products, due to the intrinsic nature of the lw of supply and demand.
Here we see a simple graph, depicting the willingness to spend, intersecting the willingness of a merchant to sell.
As you can clearly see, that as Mr and Mrs smith's financial fortunes improve, their willingness to spend extra on products they routinely buy increases. The natural market reaction to this event, is the inevitable adjusted price offered by merchants.
Now, Mr. And Mrs. Smith are both required to work. Mr. Smith still works as a screw machine operator, and Mrs. Smith still works part time at the local nursing home. But, now that they are both working, the market has naturally taken advantage of their increased buying power. Now instead of Mrs. Smith working just to help improve their quaity of life, she has to work just to make sure the two of them can pay their bills each month.
Seeing that the two of them are still struggling financially due to increased costs of living, Mr Smith suggests that Mrs. Smith switch to a full time occupation...
Now, dear viewers.. where do you suppose this will lead?
In just 5 years time, Mr and Mrs smith will both be working full time jobs to purchase the same products they have always purchased, and which they were previously purchasing on only a single breadwinning paycheck just 10 years earlier.
Working a second job, or sending a spouse to work only improves your financial situation in the short term, unless the practice is significantly undesirable that the pactice does not become mainstream.
Market forces directly mirror, and correlate with the statistical mean of consumer spending and buying power. The very wealthy occupy only a very tiny section of the population distribution; see?
As such, the very wealthy never truly experience the dramatic decline in their buying power as a result of a financial practice becoming a mainstream idea. Their contribution to the greater statistical game is miniscule, compared to the market forces at work in the median income bracket.
As a result of Mr. And Mrs. Smith, and their neighbors, the Jones family, the Applebaum family across town, who were previously just barely getting by on Mr. Applebaum's miniscule pay as a waiter at a roadside cafe, are now deeply stricken with povery, as the prices of common and vital consumer goods quickly exceeds their ability to purchase.
What is a "thriving economy" you ask?
A thriving economy is one where products are highly available, and merchants feel a modest degree of surety that they will continue to make profits and growth of their business investments. As such, a "thriving economy" is one in which Mr and Mrs Smith, representatives of the majority of the median income bracket, have their income presicely balanced by a highly lucrative and market accepted pricing structure.
The attempts of Mr and Mrs Smith to climb the ladder of affluence has instead only shifted the status quo, plunging other families into poverty,
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& T.V. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgOWTM5R2DA
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