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	a quiet place by peggy o'mara

TV Is Not Good For Kids
Issue 116

Last Sunday I was in the Baltimore airport, on my way home from DC. As I walked through the airport, the obscene cover headline of Newsweek magazine jumped out at me from every newsstand: TV is Good for Kids. Perhaps no article before has so sadly illustrated the extent of the decline of independent news reporting in the US. November 11, 2002, will go down in infamy as the day journalism died. What's especially tragic is that millions will believe the headline without reading the article, and those who read the article may believe what it says. It is superbly crafted to dismiss or omit contrary views. While it has always been true that journalism is opinion, not fact, it is now painfully obvious that opinion is for sale.

The article fails to mention that Newsweek is owned by the Washington Post, which also owns six television stations: WDIV in Detroit, KPRC in Houston, WPLG in Miami, WKMP in Orlando, KSAT in San Antonio, and WJXT in Jacksonville, as well as a regional cable system. It's telling that this article appears during an economic slump in which print advertising is down across the industry. On its website, the Washington Post states that it hopes to offset this slump in print advertising by boosting profits with cable revenues. Certainly this article will help. The two media companies mentioned most in the article, Nickelodeon and Disney, are cable channels.

The author also fails to disclose that the primary expert cited in the article, Daniel Anderson, PhD, of the University of Massachusetts, works as a paid consultant to industry and advertising. His clients include NBC, CBS, Universal Pictures, Sony, General Mills, the Leo Burnett ad agency, Nickelodeon, and the National Association of Broadcasters. And it is not clear in the article if the studies mentioned are independently or industry funded. The research that shows that children learn from television simply confirms what we already know about TV. Children do learn from it, and much of what they learn is harmful. To leave out all other research-research that has been unanimous in documenting TV's deleterious effects-and to assert that TV is good for kids because one programming study showed that children learn from it, is highly unethical. What is particularly unethical is that this article is about toddlers, children under three. The photo accompanying the article shows toddlers, and the article extols the benefits of TV for this age group.

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) is very concerned about the language and developmental impact of television programming intended for children younger than two and adamantly opposes programming and marketing to children this young. The academy confirms that TV can limit more important interactions with parents, other adults, and children, as well as encourage passive rather than active communications such as reading, listening to music, and playing, all of which are paramount to a child's normal development.

Specifically, the AAP said, "Pediatricians should urge parents to avoid television viewing for children under the age of two years. Although certain television programs may be promoted to this age group, research on early brain development shows that babies and toddlers have a critical need for direct interactions with parents and other significant caregivers for healthy brain growth and the development of appropriate social, emotional, and cognitive skills. Therefore, exposing such young children to television programs should be discouraged."

For children older than two, the AAP recommends that total TV consumption be limited to one to two hours a day and that such programming should be developmentally based, pro-social, and nonviolent, and should reinforce language and social skills. The average television consumption by children is 3 hours a day, or 21 hours a week. This is about 20 percent of a child's waking day and does not include time spent playing and watching video games and movies.

It's not just the programming, however, that is of concern for parents. Advertising isthe bigger culprit. By the time a child has graduated from high school, she will have viewed 360,000 advertisements. The AAP states that advertising directed toward children is inherently deceptive and exploits children under eight years of age "because children who are developmentally younger than 8 are unable to understand the intent of advertisements and, in fact, accept advertising claims as true."

One of the advertising claims that little girls accept as fact is that thin is beautiful. Thirty-one percent of nine-year-old girls think they are too fat, and 11 percent of eighth-grade girls are on diets. The Kaiser Family Foundation recently found that teenage girls, most of whom watch 20 hours of TV a week, are bombarded by images of extremely thin women (e.g., Ally McBeal). While the average American woman is about five feet, four inches tall and weighs 142 pounds, the average model is five feet, nine inches tall and weighs 110 pounds. At least 15 percent of Miss America contestants are underweight.

Conversely, TV is also implicated in obesity because it is the principal cause of inactivity in kids and adults. Twenty-five percent of children are overweight, and the number of overweight children ages 6 to 17 has doubled since 1968. Between 1982 and 1994, cases of type 2 diabetes, the type of diabetes most closely linked to weight, quadrupled among kids. Adult obesity usually begins in childhood. In 1999, the Journal of the American Medical Association called obesity an epidemic. Its occurrence has increased by 25 percent during the last 30 years, and between 1991 and 1998, there was an increase in obesity in all states, among both sexes, all ages, and all socioeconomic groups.

In addition to unreal images of feminine beauty and advertisements for junk food, the average young viewer is exposed to 14,000 sexual references each year. Only a handful of these provide an accurate portrayal of responsible sexual behavior or accurate information about birth control, abstinence, or the risks of pregnancy and transmitting sexual diseases.

As if the risk of obesity and diabetes, and the incidences of anorexia and bulimia, are not enough bad news for our children, the studies on television and violence confirm the toxicity. More than 1,000 scientific studies and reviews have concluded that significant exposure to media violence increases the risk of aggressive behavior in certain children and adolescents, desensitizes them to violence, and makes them believe that the world is a mean and dangerous place. In addition, news reports of bombings, natural disasters, murders, and other violent crimes can potentially traumatize young children. The March 29, 2002, edition of Science published the latest in articles that document an association between television viewing and violence. "Television Viewing and Aggressive Behavior During Adolescence and Adulthood" reported on a study involving 700 young people over a 16-year period. Of youths who watched less than an hour of TV a day at age 14, just 5.7 percent were involved in aggressive acts by ages 16 to 22, as compared with 22.5 percent of those who watched one to three hours a day and 45.2 percent of males and 12.7 percent of females who watched more than three hours a day. These aggressive acts took the form of threats to injure, general aggressive acts, physical fights, assaults, robberies, and the use of weapons to commit crimes.

Some experts predict that as much as 25 to 50 percent of the anger and violence in our society is due to the culture of violence that has been created by the television and film industries and is reinforced on a daily basis. Dr. David Pearl, chief of behavioral science research at the National Institutes of Mental Health, reports a causal link between viewing TV violence and subsequent aggressive behavior. He cites a 22-year New York study that found "the best single prediction of aggressiveness at 19 years of age turned out to be the TV programs the subjects preferred when they were 8 years old at the beginning of the study." Those with the heaviest diets of violent entertainment as children were convicted of criminal offenses 150 percent more often than those from the same classrooms with the lightest diets of violent entertainment as children. Former US Surgeon General David Satcher stated in a 2000 report on youth violence that violent television programming and video games are a public health issue and that "repeated exposure to violent entertainment during early childhood causes more aggressive behavior throughout a child's life."

The American Psychological Association (APA) notes that children who regularly watch violence on television are more fearful and distrustful of the world, less bothered by violence, and slower to intervene or call for help when they see fighting or destructive behavior. A poll by the Los Angeles Times reported that 91 percent of children said they felt "upset" or "scared" by violence on television. A University of Pennsylvania study found that children's TV shows contain roughly 20 acts of violence each hour. After watching violent programs, the APA reports, children are more likely to act out aggressively, and children who are regularly exposed to violent programming show a greater tendency toward hitting, arguing, leaving tasks unfinished, and impatience. The Yale University Family Television and Consultation Center reveals that imagination decreases as TV watching increases. Complex language and grammar skills are directly linked to fantasy play, and children who create fantasy play are more tolerant, peaceful, patient, and happy. I recall that my own children's play was more imaginative when they didn't watch television.

Joseph Chilton Pearce, author of Magical Child and, most recently, The Biology of Transcendence, says that it is television itself, not only its programming, that is dangerous. He says that children need the early time of imagination and play and that watching television prematurely matures their brains for more abstract thinking. The 60-year research of Paul MacLean, former head of the Department of Brain Evolution and Behavior at the National Institutes of Health, shows that we are never a mindless body. We are always using all three of our brains-reptilian: physical survival; limbic:group survival; and neocortex:survival of our creations. Information from the outside world goes first to the reptilian brain and then to the neocortex. All three brains perceive an image. The first and second brain, by their nature, believe and accept the image as true. A half second elapses and hundreds of thousands of nerve relationships occur between the time the reptile in us senses something and the human in us classifies it. By the time that happens, we will have already had a physical and emotional experience.

Therefore, when our children watch heightened, even disturbing events on television, even when they watch animal shows, their nervous systems will register what they see as real for half a second. Television will keep them, in a number of cases, in a constant state of arousal, even elicit a fight-or-flight hormonal response. It's not until the television is off that the images are digested. Many parents report that their children are overly active following television viewing. The inactivity and the hormonal stimulation of the television might necessitate physical activity to help integrate the experience.

It is clearly untrue to say that TV is good for kids. While educational programming may be increasing, many of these efforts are designed to capture an audience of children under age three, despite the objections of parents, physicians, and psychologists. While the article reports that people educated in child psychology act as consultants to television shows, it is not clear whom they work for and whether their recommendations will be used for programming or market research. It's clear, however, that our babies are being studied in order to learn how to better captivate them.

The article further touted a study that demonstrates that children learn from TV. This is not new information and only adds to what we alreadyknow. It should make us cautious, however, not celebratory. It is irresponsible for the article to recommend television for those under three and for the cover headline to so grossly overstate the evidence. Why would a magazine like Newsweek stoop to such deceptive journalism?

Other research that was cited in this article must scare the television industry. Twenty-two percent of parents consider getting rid of television altogether, and 93 percent think the "right" TV shows are OK in moderation. Clearly, these numbers mean that the market of television viewers is declining.

Similar combinations of sensational headlines, faulty research, and questionable experts occur by design over and over again to protect industry, even the medical industry. We report in this issue on the all-too-familiar shenanigans of the throwaway-diaper industry, which cost us the cloth-diaper industry in the 1990s. (See page 40.) And just this last year, I've seen this same combination used to attack free choice in parenting. Vaginal births, vaginal births after cesareans, homebirth, cosleeping, and breastfeeding have all been threatened by poor studies and bad press, at the same time that elective cesareans, vaccinations with mercury preservatives, and television have been extolled as safe, even good for us. In all cases, the studies (usually one) on which these new fears are promulgated have been widely criticized for faulty data, and yet the public may have already gotten the wrong idea. Tragically, media monopolies have made journalism unreliable.

What this Newsweek article illustrates is that the media concentration of the last ten years has created an inherent conflict of interest for many publishers. The interests of advertisers have taken precedence over the interests of readers. What we need now is policy that works to change this media concentration by enforcing antitrust regulations. The best description of the current media dilemma can be found in the book Rich Media, Poor Democracy, by Robert McChesney. Television is the principal way that advertisers access our children. When we limit our children's access to television, we also limit corporate predators' access to our children. Limiting television viewing is the single best thing you can do to protect your children from the influences of commercialism. To help educate yourself about the effects of television, check out these two websites: www.commercial alert.org and www.turnofftv.org.