Overexposure can affect family relationships
IN ONE OF last week’s queries to my Ask the Expert column, a parent was concerned about their three-year-old’s attention span and apparent inability to play independently for any length of time. Notably, this child only ever wanted to watch TV. Although that query made no mention of how much TV their child watched at his age, it got me thinking about the issue of children and TV.
A large study (more than 3,000 families) carried out in 1998-2000 in the US found that about two-thirds of three year olds were directly watching more than two hours of television every day. On top of that these children were, on average, exposed to about 5.2 extra hours of background TV each day. Even though this research was carried out in the US, I believe it represents the situation here in Ireland too.
You won’t be surprised to hear that I think it is a bad idea for children this age to be exposed to so much TV. Thankfully, you don’t just have my opinion to rely upon to form your own. For a start, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no TV viewing for children younger than age two and that generally TV should be limited for children. Furthermore, last year two researchers reviewed all of the data from that large US study mentioned above and found that both the direct TV watching and the background TV exposure of these three year olds was significantly associated with higher levels of childhood aggression.
The most likely explanation for this, I feel, is that in the households where this is little regulation of TV viewing the children are likely to be exposed to a whole range of possibly unsuitable programmes. Also, if children and families are spending lots of time watching TV, they are spending less time communicating and doing things that build up healthy relationships between parents and children. This is backed up by a second study, also published last year, which showed that when a TV is on in the background, showing adult-oriented programmes (in this case game shows), both the quantity and the quality of interactions between parents and children dropped.
Specifically, parents spent about 20 per cent less time talking to their children and the quality of the interactions declined, with parents less active, attentive and responsive to their youngsters.
One of my abiding beliefs is that the quality of your relationship with your child is crucial to how effective you can be as a parent. The better your child knows you, from spending time with you, the better they are able to decide how to behave. If you have consistently warm, but firm, interactions with them, they can come to rely upon the fact that you mean what you say.
This makes all aspects of discipline easier. If your children know that your “no” means “no”, they will challenge you less. If they know that you always follow through on your word, they will be more motivated by the promise of a reward.
The evidence, however, seems clear to me that if you leave the TV on in the background, and if you let your young children watch a lot of it, you have less opportunity to build these kinds of healthy relationships. So take a chance – turn off the TV and spend more time with your family. Maybe 2010 might even be the year to try to live without it altogether.