Studies tie TV time to lower test scores

Excessive television viewing by children is linked to diminished academic achievement, according to a trio of studies released yesterday in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

The findings underscore pediatricians’ admonitions that parents should limit television viewing, especially for very young children.

One study of 348 California third-graders found that children with computers in the home — but no TVs in their bedrooms — scored the highest in standardized math, reading and language-arts tests.

Not surprisingly, children with access to home computers used them several more hours a week than children without home computers, said study authors Dina L.G. Borzekowski of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Dr. Thomas N. Robinson of Stanford University’s Prevention Research Center.

Higher computer usage translated into significantly higher scores in all three test subjects, they said.

But not having a TV in the bedroom also was positively associated with higher test scores, the researchers said.

It’s possible that children scored better on tests because they watched less TV. Children without bedroom TVs watched 10.7 hours a week, compared with 12.8 hours a week by children with bedroom TVs, they said. But there could be other factors at play, such as poor sleep habits owing to bedroom TVs, they added.

A second study, of nearly 1,800 first-graders, found that children who watched more than two hours of TV a day when they were toddlers performed poorly on three reading and intelligence tests.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children younger than 2 years old not watch television, said University of Washington researchers Frederick J. Zimmerman and Dr. Dimitri A. Christakis.

A third study, conducted in New Zealand by researchers Dr. Robert J. Hancox, Barry J. Milne and Richie Poulton, studied TV viewing and long-term educational achievement of 1,000 persons born in the early 1970s.

The researchers found that watching large amounts of TV — more than three hours a day — as a child or a teen was associated strongly with not finishing school or getting a university degree by age 26.

This indicates that excessive television viewing “may have long-lasting consequences” in people’s socioeconomic well-being, they said.

A companion editorial in the pediatrics journal, which is published by the American Medical Association, said that the three studies failed to examine whether the study participants watched educational or entertainment programming.

Research has “consistently pointed to positive cognitive outcomes” if children are exposed to educational TV, wrote University of Pennsylvania researchers Deborah L. Linebarger and Ariel R. Chernin. “As a result, parents should be encouraged to incorporate well-produced, age-appropriate educational TV into their children’s lives,” they said.