TV may hamper baby talk
by Paul Taylor
The Globe and Mail
June 4, 2009
Study finds that parents don?t talk as much to their infants when a television is turned on
A new study provides fresh evidence that television is bad for babies.
It found that parents don?t talk as much to their infants when a television is turned on ? even if it is just audible in the background. And that might explain why exposure to television seems to hinder a child?s ability to learn language.
?Every word that is uttered to a baby is actually important,? said lead researcher Dimitri Christakis of the Seattle Children?s Research Institute. Language acquisition starts on the first day of a child?s life. Hearing words, and interacting with caregivers, lays the foundation for language development which normally explodes around 18 to 24 months of age.
The study involved 329 children between two months and four years of age. On randomly selected days, the children wore a small audio-recording device which captured everything they heard or said.
An analysis of those recordings revealed that each additional hour of television exposure led to a decrease of about 770 words the child heard from an adult during the recording session.
Adults typically utter approximately 941 words per hour, Dr. Christakis said.
The presence of an audible TV also put a damper on the infants, who uttered fewer words or sounds like ga-ga and goo-goo.
?Some of these reductions are likely due to children being left in front of the television screen, but others likely reflect situations in which adults, though present, are distracted by the screen and are not interacting with their infant,? the researchers write in the journal Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.
In some respects, the findings don?t seem all that surprising, Dr. Christakis said in an interview. But he added that many parents are under the mistaken belief that TV viewing ? especially infant-oriented DVDs ? helps kids learn.
?I don?t fault parents because there has been a very aggressive marketing campaign to try to convince them that these baby DVDs are really good for their baby?s brain and can teach them all kinds of things,? he said.
However, the results of his study clearly show that ?when the TV is on, parents and children are interacting less, not more,? he said, stressing that kids learn best through interaction.
Dr. Christakis noted that up to one-third of U.S. households have a TV on all the time ? regardless of whether someone is actually watching it. He suspects the same figure holds true for Canada.
?In every way, the richness of the child?s language environment is deceased by the presence of an audible TV,? he said. ?Television displaces talk ? children talk less and are spoken to less.?
by Paul Taylor
The Globe and Mail
June 4, 2009
Study finds that parents don?t talk as much to their infants when a television is turned on
A new study provides fresh evidence that television is bad for babies.
It found that parents don?t talk as much to their infants when a television is turned on ? even if it is just audible in the background. And that might explain why exposure to television seems to hinder a child?s ability to learn language.
?Every word that is uttered to a baby is actually important,? said lead researcher Dimitri Christakis of the Seattle Children?s Research Institute. Language acquisition starts on the first day of a child?s life. Hearing words, and interacting with caregivers, lays the foundation for language development which normally explodes around 18 to 24 months of age.
The study involved 329 children between two months and four years of age. On randomly selected days, the children wore a small audio-recording device which captured everything they heard or said.
An analysis of those recordings revealed that each additional hour of television exposure led to a decrease of about 770 words the child heard from an adult during the recording session.
Adults typically utter approximately 941 words per hour, Dr. Christakis said.
The presence of an audible TV also put a damper on the infants, who uttered fewer words or sounds like ga-ga and goo-goo.
?Some of these reductions are likely due to children being left in front of the television screen, but others likely reflect situations in which adults, though present, are distracted by the screen and are not interacting with their infant,? the researchers write in the journal Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.
In some respects, the findings don?t seem all that surprising, Dr. Christakis said in an interview. But he added that many parents are under the mistaken belief that TV viewing ? especially infant-oriented DVDs ? helps kids learn.
?I don?t fault parents because there has been a very aggressive marketing campaign to try to convince them that these baby DVDs are really good for their baby?s brain and can teach them all kinds of things,? he said.
However, the results of his study clearly show that ?when the TV is on, parents and children are interacting less, not more,? he said, stressing that kids learn best through interaction.
Dr. Christakis noted that up to one-third of U.S. households have a TV on all the time ? regardless of whether someone is actually watching it. He suspects the same figure holds true for Canada.
?In every way, the richness of the child?s language environment is deceased by the presence of an audible TV,? he said. ?Television displaces talk ? children talk less and are spoken to less.?
