Preschoolers pacified with TV programming

What do American kids ages 2 to 5 do an average of 32 hours a week?

It’s not napping, playing outside or building spaceships out of Legos.

It’s watching TV, according to a new report released by Nielsen, the ratings company.

According to the report, television-watching is at an eight-year high with children ages 2 to 5 leading the way, closely followed by children ages 6 to 11, who watch an average of 28 hours a week.

The reason the younger group outpaces the older? School — of all things — gets in the way of TV time for elementary-schoolers, according to Nielsen.

“These figures do kind of take my breath away,” says Vicky Rideout, a vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation and director of the foundation’s Program for the Study of Entertainment Media and Health.

“We’ve effectively pushed through what we previously thought was a ceiling in media use,” Ms. Rideout says. “It’s really become a 24/7 thing.”

And she predicts it will only increase from here on out because overall media use in the past few years has gone from being confined to the living room to being accessible anywhere and everywhere, including on the cell phone in your pocket.

“Now there’s even an iPhone app for Rubber Ducky,” a learning game for babies, Ms. Rideout says.

So, what’s the problem with all this television — not to mention all the other media available?

“That’s exactly how a lot of parents approach it. They don’t worry about it because they say watching television keeps their kid happy, in control and quiet,” says Dr. Michael Rich, director of the Center on Media and Child Health in Boston, and an associate professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School.

“But so would heroin — and you’d never give your kid heroin,” Dr. Rich says and chuckles at the bizarreness of that notion.

While no one is claiming that television is like heroin, it certainly can affect everything from learning to social interactions to physical well-being, Dr. Rich says.

Particularly in children up to 30 months old, who won’t learn anything from watching television — even if it’s education programming like “Sesame Street,” he says.

“The brain is just not ready for something like ‘Sesame Street’ until a child is at least 3 years old,” Dr. Rich says.

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