Psychologist and BPS member Dr Aric Sigman provoked media outrage in April after delivering a presentation to MPs about the harm TV viewing purportedly causes young children. Dr Sigman, who is broadly in favour of the American Academy of Paediatrics’ recommendation that children under two shouldn’t watch any TV, told us: ‘Children in the UK have more TV sets in their bedrooms and watch more screen time at earlier ages than ever before. This trend is increasing dramatically, that’s why I believe it is a health issue today.’
Even as news of Sigman’s Westminster presentation was hitting the airwaves, the nation’s columnists were clamouring for their keyboards. ‘I’m saying I’d rather trust that he’s very naive than leap immediately to the conclusion that by calling for such an insanely impractical and ludicrous piece of legislation he’s clearly hoping for attention rather than to effect change,’ wrote The Guardian’s Janine Gibson, under the headline ‘Television is not damaging our children’. In The Times, Caitlin Moran got even more personal: ‘I would hazard two guesses. He either (a) has no children, or (b) has an idyllic set-up involving a stay-at-home wife, three nannies and an attentive granny living next door.’
In fact, Dr Sigman has four children, and for a time was raised one of them on his own. ‘The media wants to portray this as a personal choice, but I was meticulous in saying that this is not my opinion, it’s not based on some whim. I simply put together what is known from biology. And I believe it’s right that the government allows parents to know that there are dangers of early and intense exposure, that there is a growing area of evidence showing the adverse effects to very young children of watching TV’.
Sigman’s presentation was based on a review he published earlier this year in Biologist, the peer-reviewed journal of the Institute of Biology (www.iob.org/downloads/1260.pdf). There he outlines research conducted across the lifespan, demonstrating associations between time spent watching TV and a range of psychological and physical ills, including poor concentration and attention, sleep problems and increased body fat.
So what is the evidence for TV’s harm to children younger than five. Sigman’s review in fact only cites two published studies that show direct associations between TV viewing in this age group and negative consequences. The first, a 2004 longitudinal study by Dimitri Christakis and colleagues of 1200 children, found that for every extra hour of average daily TV viewing between birth and three years, the children were 10 per cent more likely to have attentional problems at age seven. The second, a cross-sectional study by Dimitri Christakis and Darcy Thomson, found that among 2068 infants aged between four months and three years, those who watched more television also tended to have less regular afternoon and nighttime sleeping schedules.
The research base becomes more substantial when the focus is broadened to include TV viewing in older childhood and adolescence. For example, two studies by Robert Hancox and colleagues reported detrimental associations between TV viewing between the ages of five and 15, and educational attainment and several health measures at 26 years. Sigman’s review, which also discusses harmful associations between adult TV viewing and mental and physical health, concludes these ‘findings are set to re-cast the role of the television screen as the greatest unacknowledged public health issue of our time’.
However, not all experts are sympathetic to Sigman’s view. Dr Brian Young at the University of Exeter told us children are active in the way they use TV - they don’t just sit on the receiving end of a stream of audiovisual input. ‘There certainly are benefits for children interacting with TV,’ he said. ‘They learn stuff - it’s as simple as that. But the best learning environment is where the mother or the family collectively consume television and discuss what’s being seen. In that sense it’s a ‘window on the world’. However, he added: ‘Any medium has a downside and unsupervised viewing by very young children - the "TV as a babysitter" - is not helpful.’
|
Current