Kids Watch A Lot of Television

Shocking news: The sky is blue, water is wet and kids watch a lot of television.

Just in case you weren't sure, the TV ratings bean-counters at Nielsen have released a study showing that screen time logged by preteens is at an eight-year high. The biggest couch potatoes are the littlest kids; Nielsen reports that children age 2 to 5 spend 32 hours a week in front of the electronic babysitter. Kids 6 to 11 spend a little less time, 28 hours, perhaps because they have to go to school.Shocking news: The sky is blue, water is wet and kids watch a lot of television.

Just in case you weren't sure, the TV ratings bean-counters at Nielsen have released a study showing that screen time logged by preteens is at an eight-year high. The biggest couch potatoes are the littlest kids; Nielsen reports that children age 2 to 5 spend 32 hours a week in front of the electronic babysitter. Kids 6 to 11 spend a little less time, 28 hours, perhaps because they have to go to school.

Not all of those 32 hours are spent in passive thrall to networks and cable channels. The youngest kids spend a little over an hour a week playing videogames, another four and a half hours watching DVDs and about two hours and 15 minutes watching taped or DVR-ed shows.

But they're not as nimble with the fast forward button on the DVR remote as their older siblings; the preschoolers watch 50 percent of the commercials on pre-recorded shows, compared to the 6-to-11-year-olds, who watch just 44 percent of the ads (just like teens and adults). The older preteens also spend twice as much time (about two hours and 23 minutes a week) playing videogames as their younger brothers and sisters do.

The Nielsen study does not, of course, address whether this increased screen time is good for children. Does it make them savvy consumers of modern media, adept at remote-surfing and taking an interactive role in choosing their own entertainment from a variety of media streams, or does it make them glassy-eyed zombies with stunted imaginations and flabby physiques?

Naturally, children's health advocates claim the latter. Talking to the Los Angeles Times, Dr. Vic Strasburger, a spokesman for the American Academy of Pediatrics, says that young kids shouldn't watch more than an hour of TV a day, and certainly not the nearly five hours cited in the Nielsen study. "There are some extraordinarily good media for kids," Strasburger tells the Times. "But even the best - 'Sesame Street' for 5-year-olds - kids shouldn't be watching five hours a day. They should be outside playing. They should be having books read to them."

The Times article cites research by Strasburger (a professor of pediatrics at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine) and others claiming that increased TV time leads to obesity and poor language skills. No doubt, grownups incensed by such findings will drop their bags of chips and complain to the in-charge people at the networks and kid-video companies by typing up e-letters on their computer thingies and sending over the Interwhatsit or whatever it's called.

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