Author: Dimitri Christakis, Frederick Zimmerman, David DiGiuseppe and Carolyn McCarty
Source: PEDIATRICS, April 2004, Volume 113, Number 4, pages 708-713
In this study from the University of Washington in Seattle, researchers examined data from a long-term study of children across the United States to see if exposure to television viewing in early childhood was associated with attention problems later in life.
Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, the researchers took the number of hours of television watched (as reported by their mothers) by over 1, 200 children when they were 1 and 3 years old and examined how this compared with their score on the hyperactivity subscale on the Behavioral Problems Index (BPI) when they were around 7 years old. Children who had severe hearing impairment, severe visual impairment, serious emotional disturbances or orthopedic handicaps were excluded from the study.
Controlling for factors such as race, gender, gestational age at birth, maternal alcohol and tobacco use during pregnancy, number of children in the household, number of parents in the household and urban versus rural residence, the researchers found that early exposure to television watching was positively associated with attention problems later on in childhood.
While they acknowledged that their study didn?t prove that watching TV caused attention problems later in life, the authors stated that their findings showed there is some link between the two and supported current efforts to limit television viewing in early childhood.
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