Television...are we barking up the wrong tree?

Watching the MTV Video Awards last nights, this commentary kept echoing in my mind from the same issue of Pediatrics that houses the study citing the study you've heard so much about recently on the link between TV and later attention problems in teens. Here's the abstract of that study if you're interested.

I talked about both these Pediatrics studies on NECN today and will give you those details in a bit when I talk about my segment but in light of the MTV fiasco yesterday this topic deserves risking a bit of redundancy in posts!

We decided to watch the show out of curiosity for Britney's comeback and while headlines of her performance are right on the mark, I'm floored the headlines today are so positive. Music that had to be bleeped out due to so many swear words, music "stars" barely able to complete a sentence while presenting awards, embarrassing outfits...honestly, these starts were far from role models and nothing I saw or heard made me think "hey, that's someone I would want my kids to listen to". In fact, the rockers on that short list were interestingly absent.

Which brings me to the reason for my post today. The commentary I referred to in Pediatrics offers an interesting perspective to the study so widely cited in the press last week about the link between tv watching and later attention problems. The commentary's author, Dr. Christakis, talks about TV as an environmental influence that we have yet to figure out if it is truly a toxin, like lead, or a tonic. He compares it potentially to the alar scare on apples in the 1980's and wonders if perhaps TV is not so much about dose, i.e. the amount a child is watching, but content.

He reviews the study cited in the press on attention and applauds the study for being so thorough but points out one huge flaw: we have no idea what shows those kids were watching.

So, when you consider shows like the MTV awards, Dr. Christakis' ideas start to crystallize. Clearly the impact on TV watching on our kids is a complicated issue and before we attempt to link just the watching of TV to attentional issues I do agree with Dr. Christakis that more information is needed and in particular more information about the multimedia effects of TV on our kids and the impact of content.

In his commentary, he wrote:

"...we are in the midst of an uncontrolled experiment on the next generation of children. Proceeding with caution that was lacking during the alar scare, our challenge is to find ways to ensure that TV is more like fluoride than lead in the future." (PEDIATRICS Vol. 120 No. 3 September 2007, p648)

So, until more TV watching studies help us understand this complicated and interesting topic a bit more, how about we all avoid the true garbage out there and pick the few good shows that do exist - and keep tube time down to a minimum in general. Given how much junk is on the thousands of stations we now have at our finger tips, we're better off watching a family movie or playing a game!



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