A new study released last week from the Kaiser health care organization showed two-thirds of American children have televisions in their bedrooms. If you ask Dr. Victor Strasberger, it wouldn’t be any better if the electronic equipment in kids’ private quarters were personal computers instead.
“Televisions and personal computers are exactly parallel,” said Strasberger, chief of adolescent medicine at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine in Albuquerque. “Both can be good, bad, indifferent, harmful and useful depending on how parents control it. Left to their own devices, kids can get into as equal amounts of trouble on a personal computer or TV cable system.”
Statistics help make his case–and can leave parents wincing. In January, Strasberger was co-author of a American Academy of Pediatrics analysis that reported kids watch 16 to 17 hours per week of television, beginning at age 2. The number can reach 35 to 55 hours weekly for some teenagers when videos and video games are included.
Advertising industry research shows nearly two-thirds of kids 6 to 12 now have personal computers and 42 percent of U.S. home are hooked up to the Internet. Kids under 12 with computer access are logging on to the Internet an average of 10 hours per month, while teens are at 13 hours. Computer use among kids is up 25 percent in the last five years. But TV still commands 47 percent of children’s weekly media time. Computers occupy 10 percent.
No wonder marketing consultants are telling clients that the typical U.S. teenager views 100 images every 30 seconds and remembers 60 percent of it.
“When parents say, `Go to your room,’ it has a whole different meaning these days,” said Strasberger. “I wouldn’t mind being a kid with a TV, PC, CD-ROM, VCR, DVD and giant screen in my bedroom.”
In his study, published in the Pediatrics journal, Strasberger and his co-author, Edward Donnerstein, a psychologist at the University of California-Santa Barbara, concluded “American media contribute more to adverse health outcomes than to positive or prosocial ones.”
Although lack of physical activity and obesity are frequently mentioned as fallout from too much time in front of a screen, doctors and child development specialists are equally concerned with negative effects on learning and behavior. For instance, researchers examined nearly 10,000 hours of television programming over a three-year period, finding 61 percent contained violence and children’s programming was the biggest offender.
“We learn and establish attitudes about violence before age 8,” said Strasberger. “Our opinions about sex and drugs are more likely to gel at ages 8 to 14.”
So parents with younger children might attend most to the violent nature of any program or video game, while parents with preteens should be clear about the sexual content of what their kids are visiting on-line.
“The most effective solution is putting electronics equipment in a common room,” Strasberger said. “It provides a built-in regulation system.” If children have computers in their bedrooms, he recommended that they not have Internet connections. These should be limited to computers in common rooms, he said.
Studies show many parents are not doing their part to monitor kids’ media use. Only a quarter of parents “co-view” television with their kids. The number is speculated to be less with computer use, especially as children become teens.
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“Parents need to realize media can be electronic parents,” he said. “If parents don’t talk about drugs, sex and violence, the media will pick up the slack.”