Study Warns About Danger of Exposing Children to the "Background Noise" of Television
By Dana Sullivan

Your instincts probably tell you that putting your infant or toddler in front of the television isn’t a good idea. You might not have realized, however, that just having the TV on -- even when you think your little one isn’t paying attention to the evening news or the baseball game -- isn’t healthy either. But that’s the conclusion of a new study, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The study, published in the July/Agust issue of the journal Child Development, found that television disrupts young children while they play, even if the TV is tuned to “adult” shows. Researchers worry that the distraction might affect children’s early cognitive development. The study involved 50 children, ages one to three years, who came with a parent to a lab at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. At the lab, the children were invited to play for an hour with age-appropriate toys. For 30 minutes, a television showing the game show Jeopardy! was on. For the other half-hour, the TV was off. Researchers wondered whether the children would be distracted by the television. Indeed, they found that the television distracted the play of the children at every age. When the television was on, the children played for significantly shorter periods of time than and weren’t as focused on their play as they were when the television was off. “Background TV, as an ever-changing audiovisual distractor, disrupts children’s efforts to sustain attention to ongoing play behaviors,” says Marie Evans Schmidt, who is now a research associate at the Center on Media and Child Health at Children’s Hospital Boston, and is the lead author on the study. “It is a chronic environmental risk factor affecting most American children,” she says.

Even though pediatricians routinely recommend that parents not allow children who are younger than two years old to watch television, it’s not always advice that is heeded: The NSF says that three quarters of very young children live in homes where the television is on “most of the time.” The bottom line: parents and caregivers should avoid exposing infants and toddlers to television even if the adults think their kids are not paying attention to it.