Spending too much time watching television can harm the cognitive, physical and social development of young children. Symptoms appear especially when entering adolescence.
When you are tired from your week or it is raining heavily, you are tempted to suggest that your child watch a film or a cartoon. But the number of hours spent in front of the small screen has harmful long-term consequences on the development of the child, especially during the first years of his life, warns a recent Canadian study published end of December in the magazine Pediatric Research.
According to Linda Pagani, professor at the School of Psychoeducation at the University of Montreal and lead author of the study, when children’s attention is diverted by the screen “the risks of not having enough interactions physical and social skills to promote adequate physical and socio-emotional development are greater”.
Coordinated by the Statistical Institute of Quebec, the study longitudinally followed a cohort of 1,859 Quebec children born between the spring of 1997 and the spring of 1998 in order to examine whether there was a link between the fact of having a TV in the bedroom at the age of 4 and the physical, mental and social problems encountered later on entering adolescence.
“We eliminated any pre-existing conditions in the children or families that could bias our results,” explains Pr Pagani.
Higher body mass and lesssocial interactions
The team that led the study used different methods to assess the psychological, physical and social state of the children, followed up to the age of 13: measurement of the children’s body mass index, questionnaire on the quality of their diet, penchant for junk food, degrees of social interaction at school, emotional level etc. “All of these measures are good indicators of later physical and mental health in adulthood,” says Linda Pagani.
The results of the study show that having a TV in the bedroom at the age of 4 is likely to increase body mass index, promote so-called “unhealthy” eating habits, and results in lower levels of sociability and states of emotional distress, even depressive symptoms.
These risks increase when the television set is located in the bedroom. “Having private access to a screen in the bedroom during the preschool years does not bode well for long-term health. The children in our study were born at a time when television was the single screen in the bedroom Given the mobility of digital devices and the constant switching between devices today, our research supports a strong position for parental guidelines on the availability and accessibility of televisions and other devices,” she concludes.
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