More than four hours a day...Thats how much television your children are watching on average. However, research has proven time and again that too much television harms our children's ability to read and perform well in school, encourages violence and promotes sedentary lifestyles and obesity.

For more than 20 years, research has shown that children who spend many hours with television each day are less likely to get good grades. Even though most educators know this, most parents do not. Research has identified why excessive television watching contributes to learning difficulties. Too much television:

• Slows the development of thinking skills and imagination
• Shortens attention spans
• Slows the growth of reading and speaking skills
• Conditions a child to the dual distractions of sound and images, a constant level of stimulation not found in most classrooms.

Chilling Statistics

• Average time per week that children aged between 2 and 17 spends watching television: 19 hours 40 minutes
• Hours the average youth spends in school per year: 900
• Hours the average youth spends watching television per year: 1,023
  Children under the age of two should not be watching television
  When pediatricians recommend no television watching for children under 2, they do so because such viewing can interfere with the enormous amount of brain development that occurs during a child's first few years. This brain development determines a child's ability throughout life to learn and process new information. It comes about through establishing connections between the billions of neurons we are born with. The first few years of life constitute a window of opportunity to make those connections, and, once those years pass, creating new connections becomes increasingly difficult.
  

Telling fact from fiction. Young children have unique problems concerning television because they can't figure out what is real and what isn't. Since children are visual learners, they absorb both the positive and negative behaviors they see. If a child views violent television, they accept violence as normal.

Some studied even go so far as to suggest that children who regularly watch violence on television:

• Become less sensitive to the pain and suffering of other
• Become more fearful of the world around them
• Become more likely to behave in an aggressive and/or harmful way towards others
  Television Interferes with the development of intelligence, thinking skills and imagination. It takes very little mental effort to follow a television show. Kids raised on television believe it takes less effort to learn from books because they are used to being spoon-fed information by television. Opportunities for a child's imagination to develop are also denied by habitual television viewing. Children need some unstructured time to allow imagination skills to form by thinking about a book read or a story heard, a conversation in the home, or an event in school, or just the scene outdoors.

Television conditions a child to dual stimuli: sound and images. The persistence of television sound and rapidly-changing images can condition a child to expect that level of stimulation in other circumstances, notably school. But there, a child will be called upon to speak, to listen to a teacher, work some problems, or read, none of which contain the attention-grabbing effect of television.

Watching television inhibits the growth of longer attention spans. As with conditioning a child to the sound and images of television, the approximately seven minute length of program before a commercial interruption can condition a child to a seven minute attention span.

Watching television Interferes with the development of reading skills. A child must learn to move the eyes back and forth across the page in order to read. But with television, the eyes fix on the screen. One hour a day in school learning to move the eyes back and forth cannot compete with four or more hours with the eyes fixed on a television screen. Its little wonder that many children find difficulty learning to read.

Watching television decreases the time for developing speaking skills. Children may hear new words on a television show, but this is not the same as speaking. If they are watching television, they aren't spending time talking. Children generally start to talk by speaking single words, then progress to short sentences, then to groups of sentences. Reading to a child, and speaking to a child directly, aid the development of speaking skills. A child rarely develops proficiency with speech simply by getting older. A child spending four or more hours a day watching television loses the time needed for conversation, and may well find difficulty becoming articulate and fluent, and be less able to speak and write in complete sentences.

What can you do?
As a parent, there are many ways you can help your child develop positive viewing habits. The following tips may help:

• Set limits (no television after 6pm, or only on weekend mornings)
• Plan your child's viewing
• Watch TV with your child
• Do not leave the television on unattended, even as background noise
• Look for quality children's videos and DVD's
• Give other options such as reading a book or playing a game
• Help your child to develop a balanced viewing schedule of different types of programs such as educational, comedy, arts, fantasy etc.).
• Always pay attention to the PG rating of programs and films
  Many parents believe that, at its worst, television watching is a waste of time. But that's not the worst. Television viewing hinders a child's ability to learn and develop properly.

A Quick Word about Cinema
Many parents seem to think that theres nothing wrong with taking their young children to the movie and it is not unusual to find children under the age of 10 happily munching away on popcorn while their parents enjoy the latest blockbuster (PG rating 16).

Not only is it inadvisable to take young children anywhere after 9pm (see Children & Sleep) most movies reach a noise level that can be potentially damaging to adult) let alone children's) ears. According to the New York Times News Service, parts of the film Godzilla reached 115 decibels. It is a fact that a sustained level of 85 decibels or more for a period of 8 hours can irreversibly damage hearing and that it is recommended that a decibel level of over 100 should not be endured for longer than 1 and a half minutes!