Children who watch fast-paced cartoons like SpongeBob SquarePants perform worse when asked to follow rules or delay gratification than kids who spend time drawing or watching slower, educational programs, a study has found.
Four-year-old children who watched nine minutes of SpongeBob performed only half as well on tasks as those who spent the same amount of time drawing or watching Caillou, an educational program about a four-year-old boy, lead author of the study in the journal Pediatrics Prof Angeline Lillard said.
Programmes that are fast paced and feature unrealistic events may over-stimulate the brain, making it harder to trigger executive function, a process used to complete tasks, Prof Lillard said. Children may also mimic the characters after the show ends and not concentrate.
Parents need to consider how frenetic a show is, as well as its content, when deciding what their young children watch, she said. "We don't know how long this effect lasts," said Prof Lillard, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. "It may be that children recover quickly. Certainly, immediately after, there was a strong impact particularly on the most challenging tasks."
In the study, 60 four-year-olds were split into three groups. One group watched a truncated episode of "a very popular fantastical cartoon about an animated sponge that lives under the sea".
Another saw a truncated episode of a "realistic PBS [Public Broadcasting Service] cartoon about a typical US preschool-aged boy".
The third was given paper, crayons and markers and spent the time drawing.
The children were then asked to perform four tasks such as playing games that involved following rules and an activity in which they had to delay having a snack. The researchers measured how well each child performed. Those who watched SpongeBob performed the worst on all tasks, while overall those in the drawing group and the Caillou group performed about the same, the findings show.
"These children's brains were actually tired from all of the stimulation, and then the expectation that they focus on something became a challenge for them," said Dimitri Christakis, director of the Center for Child Health, Behavior and Development at Seattle Children's Research Institute.
"Not all TV is the same," he said. "It's not about no television, it's really about appropriate amounts and appropriate types of television."
A typical preschooler spends about 4.5 hours a day watching television or DVDs, said Mr Christakis, who wrote an accompanying commentary in the journal. Children today start watching TV at four months of age compared with four years of age in 1970, he said.
Bloomberg