Sponsor |  usmjam | Mar 14, 2:11pm | From the page: "The numbers of children with a television in the bedroom are staggering. According to one study, 70% of third-graders had a television set in the room -- we are talking about eight-year-olds.
Reporter Tara Parker-Pope also points to the obvious fact that one danger is simply that children and teens will watch more television. As she reported:
In a study of 80 children in Buffalo, ages 4 to 7, the presence of a television in the bedroom increased average viewing time by nearly nine hours a week, to 30 hours from 21. And parents of those children were more likely to underestimate their child's viewing time.
"If it's in the bedroom, the parents don't even really know what the kids are watching," said Leonard H. Epstein, professor of pediatrics and social and preventive medicine at the School of Medicine and Biomedical Science at the State University of New York at Buffalo. "Oftentimes, parents who have a TV in the kids' bedrooms have TVs in their bedrooms."
Consider that picture of family bliss -- each member of the family ensconced in his or her bedroom with a private television. That's just what we need. Parents who watch too much television set bad examples for their children and teenagers. Then, adding insult to injury, some then facilitate more viewing by putting a private television set in the child's room.
More:
But in 2002, the journal "Pediatrics" reported that preschool children with bedroom TVs were more likely to be overweight. In October, the journal "Obesity" suggested that the risk might be highest for boys. In a study among French adolescents, boys with a bedroom television were more likely than their peers to have a larger waist size and higher body fat and body mass index.
The French study also showed, not surprisingly, that boys and girls with bedroom TVs spent less time reading than others." |
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