Television (TV) has its own good side and bad side as well. It can be entertaining and educational, which can be open up a completely new world for kids by giving them a chance to travel the globe, learn about different cultures and tradition, and gain exposure to ideas they may never encounter in their own community. Most of the time, it creates a positive effect on kid’s behavior with positive role model too. However, the reverse can also be true with kids.
Kids are likely to learn things from TV that parents do not want them to learn. TV (R) can affect a kid’s health, behavior, and family life in negative ways.
In this article, we will focus on the ways how can TV affect your child’s health, so that you can take care of your kids in a proper and systematic way.
What do I Need to Know About Children and TV?
It is worthwhile for parents to figure out about what role they want a TV to play in their family.
- A great relationship between children and television, because there have been thousands of studies on the subject or topic. Researchers have studied how TV affects kids’ sleep, weight, grades, behavior, and many more. It’s worth looking at what the research says when deciding how to manage television in your family.
- Spending time watching TV can take time away from healthy activities like active playing with friends, eating dinner together as a family, reading, etc. TV time also takes away from participating in sports activity, music, art or other activities that require practice to become skillful for your children.
- TV viewing starts earlier than other forms of media and often begin before the age of two. In recent years, TV, video, and DVD programs have raised the bar geared towards babies and toddlers. There are now specific cable channels for babies and children as well.
How Many Hours a Day Does your Child Watch TV?
Most kids plug into the world of television long before they enter school. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF):
- Two-thirds of infants and toddlers watch a screen an average of 2 hours a day
- Kids under age 6 watch an average of about 2 hours of screen media a day, primarily TV, videos or DVDs
- Kids and teens, 8 to 18 years, spend nearly 4 hours a day in front of a TV screen and almost 2 additional hours on the computer and playing video games
- The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommends that kids under 2 years should not watch any TV and that those older than 2 shouldn’t watch any more than 1 to 2 hours a day of quality programming.
The first 2 years of life are considered a crucial time for brain development in children. TV and other electronic media can get in the way of exploring, playing, and interacting with parents and others close and dear. Television encourages learning and healthy physical and social development of children.
As kids get older, over the course of time, too much screen time can interfere with activities such as physical activity, reading, doing homework, playing with friends, and spending time with family, etc. get affected by television.
Of course, TV in moderation can be a good thing and it has a lot more advantage too. Pre-schoolers can get a lot of help by learning the alphabet on television or digital media. The grade-schoolers children can learn about wildlife on nature shows or channel, and parents can keep themselves updated with current events on the evening news.
How Big do TV Plays in Kids live?
No doubt about the goodness of television — TV can be an excellent educator and entertainer for everyone right from childhood to adulthood. But, too much TV can be a bad thing and affects your child’s health:
- Children who consistently spend more than 4 hours per day watching TV are more likely to be overweight.
- Kids who view violent acts on TV are more likely to show aggressive behavior and tend to fear that the world is scary and that something bad will happen to them.
- TV characters mostly often depict risky behaviors in children, such as smoking and drinking, and also reinforce gender-role and racial stereotypes.
- Kids who spend more time watching TV both with and without parents and siblings spend less time interacting with family members as compared to other children who don’t spend much time watching TV.
- Most children’s programs that appear on TV do not teach the value what parents say they want their children to learn from it, rather many shows are filled with stereotypes, violent solutions to problems, and mainly mean behavior.
- As kids get older, over the course of time, too much screen time can interfere with activities such as physical activity, reading, doing homework, playing with friends, and spending time with family, etc.
How TV Affects Your Child’s Health?
In the above points, we have given a brief idea or information on how TV can affect your child’s health and mind. Now, let us go in deep into the matter to find out the various points in details:
1. Violence:
As per The average American, a child will witness 200,000 violent acts on television by age 18. Children may become desensitized to violent acts and become more aggressive. TV violence sometimes affects children to beg for imitation because violence is often promoted as a fun and effective way to get what you want and desire.
Most of the violent acts are perpetrated by the “good guys,” the ones kids have been taught to admire. Even though the children are taught or taught by their parents that it’s not right to hit someone, but television says it’s OK to bite, hit, or kick if you’re the good guy. This phenomenon can lead to confusion when children try to understand or figure out the difference between right and wrong. And the “bad guys” on TV aren’t always held responsible or punished for their actions what they perform to.
Young kids and children are particularly frightened by scary and violent images. Simply telling kids that those images aren’t real won’t console them or relax them, because they can’t yet find the difference between fantasy and reality. Behavior problems, nightmares, and difficulty sleeping may follow with exposure to media violence by the children.
2. Risky Behaviour:
A TV is full of programs and commercials that depict risky behaviors which affect the children’s health pushing them for drinking alcohol, taking drugs, smoking cigarettes, other substance abuse and having premarital sex, etc. The children think it is cool, fun, and exciting to do so. And often, there’s no discussion about the consequences and effect of those actions.
Certain research studies have shown that teens who watch lots of sexual content or activity on TV are more likely to initiate intercourse or participate in other sexual activities earlier than the peers and other children who don’t watch sexually explicit shows or content.
The ratio of alcohol ads on TV have actually increased over the last few years and more and more underage kids are being exposed to them than ever from last research. A recent study by the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth (CAMY) found that youth exposure to alcohol ads on TV increased by 30% from 2001 to 2006.
Cigarette ads are banned on television and other media, but kids and teens can still see plenty of people smoking on programs and movies airing on TV nowadays. This kind of “product placement” makes the child feel like these kinds of acts are acceptable. In fact, children who watch 5 or more hours of TV per day are far more likely to begin smoking cigarettes (R) than those who watch less than the recommended 2 hours a day.
3. Nutrition and Obesity:
Health experts have long linked between excessive TV watching to nutrition and obesity. This is a significant health problem in today’s world. While watching TV, most of the kids are inactive and tend to have snacking habits. The children are also bombarded with ads that encourage them to eat unhealthy foods like potato chips, empty-calorie soft drinks, etc. as preferred snack foods.
Studies have shown that decreasing the amount of TV that kids watched led to less weight gain and lower body mass index (BMI) than who watch TV while snacking.
Breakfast like cereals, snacks, and fast foods are among the most heavily advertised products on a television program that aimed at children and tend to have higher energy density than other products such as fruits or vegetables which are less frequently advertised on TV. The amount of time spent viewing television by kids directly correlates with the request, purchase, and consumption of foods that are advertised on television.
4. Commercial:
According to the AAP, children in the United States see 40,000 commercials each year on the TV. Right from the junk food to toy ads cartoons. They are the marketing messages all around the kids. And for kids, everything looks ideal and they simply like to have it. It all sounds so appealing and attractive that kids just get carried away. Mostly, kids under the age of 8, don’t understand that commercial ads are for selling a product. Children under 6 years can’t even distinguish program content from ads they watch it, especially if their favorite character or individual is promoting the product. Even in some cases, older kids may even need to be reminded of the purpose of advertising.
Of course, it’s impossible to eliminate all exposure to marketing messages that commercial ads do. But, you can try turn off the TV or at least limit kids’ watching TV, but they’ll still see and hear plenty of commercial ads. What you can do the best is- when your kids ask for any products advertised, then explain that commercials and other ads are designed or focused to make people want things they don’t necessarily need. Talking to kids about what things are like in reality and appealing can help you to put things into proper perspective.
5. Sex and Sexuality:
American television with both programming and advertising are highly sexualized in their content. Each passing year, the children and adolescents view 14,000 sexual references including innuendoes, and jokes, of which less than 170 deal with a phenomenon such as abstinence, birth control, sexually transmitted diseases, or pregnancy, etc. Nearly one-third of family hour shows contain sexual references, and the incidence of vulgar language has increased greatly in today’s world.
The soap operas, are highly viewed by adolescents, that show extramarital sex eight times more commonly than sex between spouses. In today’s time, there have only been four studies that examined the relationship between early onset of sexual intercourse and television viewing among the children. However, there are numerous variations of studies which illustrate television as a powerful influence on teenager’s sexual attitudes, values, and beliefs. The teens rank the digital media second only to school sex education programs and commercial as a leading source of information about sex and sexual activity.
Ways to Avoid the Harmful of Effects of Television:
The effect of television on children’s health can slow down if parents can help to decrease the harmful effects of television by screening the type of programming and advertisement and to restrict by limiting the amount of time a child watches television. The following are suggestions or tips that can help you in helping set good television viewing habits:
- Choose TV programs for your child to watch. Always make sure you plan what your child will see on TV rather than turning the TV on randomly. Give choices between 2 programs you think that is appropriate and healthy for your child.
- Limit TV viewing hours to 1 or 2 hours a day for children older than 2 years of age. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children younger than 2 years should not watch TV at all.
- Switch to educational shows from the local Public Broadcasting Station (PBS), or from programmings such as the Discovery Channel, Learning Channel, or History Channel that is educational.
- Watch TV with your child, involve yourself with your kids while watching TV. Talk about what happened on the show. Talk about what was good or bad about the program. Talk about the difference between reality and make-believe. Have a healthy conversation about what you see together.
- Turn the TV off if the program or ad is something that you believe your child should not watch.
- Do not assume all cartoons are acceptable and appropriate. Many cartoons contain violence and aggressive behavior.
- Many daytime programs such as soap operas and talk shows are not appropriate for children at all.
- Be a good example to your child by not watching too much television for yourself too. Rather than that, be involved in other activities, like reading, writing, etc.
- Encourage some play and exercise for your child and plan other fun activities for your child, so he or she has choices instead of watching TV.
- Limit to using TV as a reward for good behavior. Try a trip to the park, or a playground, or a visit to a relative’s or friend’s house instead of watching TV.
- Do not allow TV watching during mealtimes.
Television has an ample of benefits on a kid’s life, but at the same time, we should not ignore its bad effects too. The above information and details with all the pros and cons of television will definitively help you in protecting your child from the negative effects of TV on them. A simple step of yours can give a better and protective healthy environment to your kids.
