TV causes children’s attention disorders

PARENTS of toddlers should turn off their TVs to reduce the risk of their children developing attention span problems later on, an expert warned yesterday.

Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Washington, Dr Dimitri Christakis, has found a link between children younger than three years of age who watch TV and attention problems.

“We found that the more TV children watched under the age of three the more likely they were to have attention problems when they were seven years old,” he said.

It is the norm now for Irish homes to have more than one TV, with parents placing a heavy reliance on the electronic babysitter in the corner as they go about their other household tasks.

A recently published Irish study found that overweight children are likely to have four or more televisions in their home, with some having up to six.

Dr Christakis' research now shows that a child who watched two hours of TV a day before the age of three was 20% more likely to have attention problems by age seven, compared to a child who watched no television before the age three.

Asked during an interview on RTÉ radio yesterday if the problem was caused by a lack of interaction, Dr Christakis, said the research team concluded that TV's rapid image change was over-stimulating the developing mind.

He explained that during the first three years of life connections are being formed between brain cells; in other words, the wiring of the mind.

There was a real risk, he said, that a child’s brain could become conditioned to expecting the same rapid pace in real life. Such children were switching off when their expectations in real life were not realised.

Asked how parents should respond to the research, Dr Christakis said they should be turning off their TVs.

There were other strategies that parents could employ, he said. “Three year olds are perfectly capable of helping parents make dinner. In many cases, they can be more of a hindrance than a help but they can participate in the process.”

Dr Christakis said the American Academy of Pediatrics had recommended that children under the age of two should not watch TV at all and the study now provided evidence to support that recommendation.

Deputy director of the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Research Development Unit in New Zealand, Dr Bob Hancock, found that those who watched the most TV as children had the most health problems as adults.

This is based on a continuing study of 1,000 people born in Dunedin between the years 1972 and 1973.

He found quite a strong association between TV and those who were overweight, unfit, smoked or had high blood cholesterol.