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No TV for children under 2, urge doctors

nytimes.com

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Re: No TV for children under 2, urge doctors

#121

Post by vidarh »

derekprior wrote: post #50

I agree that limiting screen time is important, and my wife and I are careful to limit our son's screen time and not expose him to "second hand TV." That said, I take issue with the following passage from the article: "Even so-called educational videos do not benefit children under 2 because they are too young to be able to understand the images on the screen, the doctors’ group said." My son watches a DVD from the "…

My two and a half year old has a number of favorite videos, and when watching them, he will frequently turn to us and tell us to watch and then go on to launch into lengthy verbal explanations of what has happened or what will happen up to about 5 minutes ahead in the video. He's done this for months.

Of course "under two's" versus 30 months is a big gap, but it's not like he just suddenly started telling us these things either - a lot of the words and phrases he's picked up over the last year comes straight from things he's seen on TV or DVD's.

Re: No TV for children under 2, urge doctors

#122

Post by vidarh »

phuff wrote: post #81
maratd wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> incorporated teaching him sign language from the time he was 4 months If you don't mind elaborating on this, why did you teach him sign language?

We're doing this with our second child now. It removes a lot of frustration from the parents and the kids when the child can actually communicate about what they want, see, hear, think, etc. It seems to cut down on fits, and definitely helps us communicate. As one of the other commenters said kids' language apparatus is fully functioning before they have the fine motor skills necessary to make all the speech sounds t…

> As one of the other commenters said kids' language apparatus is fully functioning before they have the fine motor skills necessary to make all the speech sounds they need to say words

To add to this: My son is 30 months, and his speech is coming along well, but one really fascinating part is how he will construct sentences that are far more elaborate than what he can say, and substitute "missing" words for with a specific sound.

It is clear these aren't "just" sounds from how he'll repeat phrases with the right number of "words", just some of them are padded out because he doesn't know how to say them yet, and then gradually more words will get added to the various phrases as he figures out how to pronounce them.

Re: No TV for children under 2, urge doctors

#123

Post by alttag »

voidfiles wrote: post #89
Alex3917 wrote: post #46

Some statistics and information from the 2008 book Parenting, Inc.: "A nationally representative study from the 1990s found that only 17 percent of children under one were watching television and fewer than half of children between the ages of one and two watched. In a 2006 study of 1,009 parents, 40 percent of babies were watching TV or DVDs/videos by three months; the average baby started watching videos at six mon…

In school we studied research that correlated how many of hours of TV a day a person watched, and life expectancy. As many people thought the more tv you watched your life expectancy fell. When you first hear that it sounds like TV can reduce your years on earth. When they took a close look though they found a confounding variable; health care. Those who watched more TV tended to be poorer, and thus had less healthca…

It's a good point, but I rather suspect that if we can find a link to the studies listed here that economic status would be statistically controlled for. For research at this level I would be greatly surprised if it weren't.

Re: No TV for children under 2, urge doctors

#124

Post by alttag »

pyre wrote: post #88
Alex3917 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a popular trend because kids are able to do sign language before they're able to speak. IIRC it doesn't seem to help their language acquisition or cognitive develop at all, but it doesn't seem to hurt much either.

I've heard that it can lead to less frustration when the child has a means to communicate with the parents. If they know enough to be able to sign their brains are developed enough to want to communicate something. As a counter-point, my daughter did not pick up on sign language at all. The advice that we got was to stick with a single sign and keep at it until she signed it back at us. My wife chose "Milk," but that…

  > I've heard that it can lead to less frustration when the
  > child has a means to communicate with the parents.
Absolutely. Our youngest kids learned a small handful of signs (five or so) before they could speak, and it made things much easier. "More", "milk" (was hard to teach, but when it stuck it was great), "banana", and few others. Someone else here said "done" was useful, and I wish we would have done that one.

Re: No TV for children under 2, urge doctors

#125

Post by vidarh »

ajross wrote: post #74
guygurari wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A correlation is still a very real statistical thing. It doesn't automatically imply causation, but it doesn't rule it out either. In fact, it's usually pretty good evidence in favor of causality." If A and B are correlated, it might mean that A -> B, or that B -> A, or that there's a C that leads to both A and B. Without further data, there is no way to distinguish between these possibilities. And often the actual…

You're overextending the logic here. Yes, that's a correct explanation of the difference between correlation and causation. But just because the B->A case matches logic doesn't mean that it works as a hypothesis. (In this case, I guess it would mean that children with speech delays are able to induce their parents to let them watch more TV -- that's absurd to the point of being nonsensical). In fact, where there is a…

> children with speech delays are able to induce their parents to let them watch more TV -- that's absurd to the point of being nonsensical).

Is it? A child that does not speak much takes more effort to engage with in play that does not get boring and tedious to the parent, and may get frustrated with the parent more easily from finding it hard to get their meaning across. In this case more TV would be a "solution" for both parties, and might be arrived at simply because it causes fewer tantrums and less stress for the parents.

I don't believe that's the most likely cause, but I also do believe one should be exceedingly careful about jumping to conclusions about cause based on "common sense" and correlation, because a whole lot of explanations that people would never even think of suddenly seem like common sense after the fact.

> In fact, where there is a clear and sane hypothesis in play (e.g. "time spent watching TV is time not spent learning to talk") it almost always works out that further science shows the causation that you expect.

Does it?

Re: No TV for children under 2, urge doctors

#126

Post by alttag »

dadkins wrote: post #21
jsherry wrote: post #8

I'm not here to promote the idea of children under 2 should watch TV, but statements like this largely invalidate studies such as this: "The pediatrics group’s guidelines point out that research to date suggests a “correlation between television viewing and developmental problems, but they cannot show causality.”"

That doesn't invalidate the study at all. A correlation is still a very real statistical thing. It doesn't automatically imply causation, but it doesn't rule it out either. In fact, it's usually pretty good evidence in favor of causality. If this correlation shows up in enough studies without any alternative explanations, causality would become the prevailing theory. Dealing with human subjects and long term effects…

Yup. In social science (IIRC, I wish I could find the reference), three conditions much exist to infer causality: 1) Temporal precedence, that is A must precede B in time, 2) correlation, and 3) (IIRC) explanation that confounds have been considered and (statistically) rejected.

Of course, the best way to demonstrate causality is empirical test with a treatment and control group, but this is rarely possible in social sciences, and in studies like this would be downright unethical.

Thus, we're stuck trying to determine causality, and correlation is a strong tool to help us get there.

Re: No TV for children under 2, urge doctors

#127

Post by bambax »

0x12 wrote: post #53

No TV is so 1990. Really, today 'No TV' would be easy to achieve while still overdosing on Youtube, netflix and so on. Computers screens are more often than not the delivery vector for your daily dose of passive consumption. And it's not just the desktop machines either, it's the iPads and the phones that happily join in. Even not having a TV no longer means that you are immunized against this, and being without inte…

> No TV is so 1990. Really, today 'No TV' would be easy to achieve while still overdosing on Youtube, netflix and so on.

I disagree. You can leave TV on and have an uninterrupted stream of content, images, sound, noise constantly delivered to you with zero effort. Not so with Netflix or Youtube.

You can't "leave Netflix on" because at the end of the program it will just stop and wait for you to choose another one. That alone makes a huge difference (to say nothing of the absence of advertising).

Re: No TV for children under 2, urge doctors

#128

Post by Tloewald »

Alex3917 wrote: post #91
voidfiles wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In school we studied research that correlated how many of hours of TV a day a person watched, and life expectancy. As many people thought the more tv you watched your life expectancy fell. When you first hear that it sounds like TV can reduce your years on earth. When they took a close look though they found a confounding variable; health care. Those who watched more TV tended to be poorer, and thus had less healthca…

"It's possible that the same thing is happening in this group of research as well." In this case we already know that the most important mediating variables for predicting outcomes on the relevant measures are parent-child talk and self-directed play, so it's very easy to see how each hour of watching TV causes increasing damage. I'm sure some of the gap is because of mere correlation, but it's also clear that TV wat…

The researchers make claims like the kids watching tv have no idea what's going on. My kids would play Angry Birds and rearrange our iPhone icons to make their favorite apps more accessible. (They could also explain some of what was going on in tv shows they liked.)

Maybe these researchers are Skinnerian behaviorists who think the kids are just exhibiting behavior.

Re: No TV for children under 2, urge doctors

#129

Post by gahahaha »

vidarh wrote: post #118
gahahaha wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He wrote "I'm sure some of the gap is because of mere correlation", so I think he IS grasping the point. Personally I thin it is OBVIOUS that TV is damaging children since it is unnatural the same way sugar is. The kids of our ancestors have been crawling around on the floor exploring and playing for millions of years - sitting in front of flickering lights for hours on end for just 30 years.

A lot of medicines are "unnatural the same way sugar is". Are they obviously damaging children too?

If the kids are otherwise healthy and eat a lot of the medicines, then yes, obviously. Eating a lot of medicines is OBVIOUSLY very bad for healthy children.

Re: No TV for children under 2, urge doctors

#130

Post by nihilocrat »

dbbo wrote: post #93
nihilocrat wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Video games allow the user to interact with the media and cause reactions to input. It allows us to explore causality at a very personal level, even though the systems and entities invovled are entirely virtual. Live theater allows the user to control what to focus on during each scene. If there is a conversation, we can choose who the "camera" is pointing at. We are also looking at real human beings interacting with…

How is looking at an image of live human beings "worse" than looking at live human beings (which is ultimately an image too)? If the child is given a remote control, does that count as interactivity since he can choose what to look at while exploring causality? By the way, I'm not arguing that TV is good for kids. I'm just trying to analyze the argument in favor of preventing infants from watching passive screen medi…

You can't compare seeing human beings interacting in a "true 3D", real-life setting to the same thing happening on a screen. You don't get depth perception, and there are artifacts of recording in video and audio (even in modern HD shows) that make a real-life scene distinctly different. I don't know scientifically how that's important, I just know there's a difference. You know there's a difference if you ever see someone on TV and then see them in real life for the first time.

A remote doesn't explore causality inside the media, it's only exploring "when I press a certain button it will switch to a different show which is not of my choosing and which I can't predict". They might correllate pressing the same numbers with the same show at the same time of the day. The "camera angle" interactivity in live theater doesn't get into causality at all, just different ways you can look at or listen to a scene, but in videogames causality is rarely so random.

Think of it at a very basic, I-don't-know-what-TV-or-videogames-are level: I press the channel up button on the remote, the image suddenly changes to something entirely different. If I do this a few hours later, the former image and the latter image are entirely different from before. Let's even assume I'm watching Netflix and I've figured out how to navigate menus: the menu is interactive, but the media I'm watching doesn't give me any control over what's happening inside the media. In a videogame, if I press a button a character will move, a gun will shoot, a menu will open. If I do the same thing a few hours from now, the same thing will happen. A different thing might happen in a predictable context: if my dude is in front of a wall he might climb the wall rather than jump when I press A, it's generally bad design to allow otherwise. The link between cause and effect is much more clear, and my role as an agent of cause is much more clear as well.

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