Having the TV on constantly in a home with infants and toddlers?

M

My BFF is a Pitador!

New member
I saw this quote on yahoo news, "Having the television on constantly in a household with infants and toddlers is bad for brain and language development because it reduces the number of words the kids hear and say, a study showed Monday."

Personally, we don't watch TV as a matter of personal choice but I am wondering how people who do keep the TV on for many hours a day feel about this.

Also I read years ago that watching TV when a child is too young can cause ADD and a school age child that watches excessive TV is the leading cause of ADD in this age group.
 
Too much tv or anything is not good that is for sure...but the real leading cause of ADD is bad parenting and the medical inddustry being at a loss to tell those parents to start having rules and following through and teaching their kids some respect.
 
Although I respect the opinions of many on here, I think these reports are BS. They tell us what they want us to hear. My TV is on roughly 75% of the day. My son is very active, will pause on occasions to watch, but on the most part he is playing with my wife or myself. His speech is second to none. He is not quite 3 years old, and you can quite easily have a conversation with him regarding what he did during the day, had for lunch, etc.
 
While I think there is truth in those theories - I think that applies more to children who watch tv all day, not necessarily a household that has the tv on all day (on music channels or non-children's channels). My tv is on a lot of the day (but no-where near all day) but my children only watch a little and spend more of the time spending one-on-one time with me or their dad.
If children watch cartoons all day, it is very likely to lead to other problems.
 
When my wife and I were expecting our first. SIDS seemed to be the designer bogey man to scare young parents with.

I read a Reader's Digest article about 10 suspected causes of SIDS.

The only one that I understood and made any sense suggested that a household is kept TOO quiet when the baby is sleeping.

Because the baby's brain isn't too far along in it's development for the first five years of life an TOO quiet of a sleeping environment will allow the baby's brain to sink into TOO deep asleep mode and it's little brain simply forgets to breathe and tell it's little heart to beat.

So the little baby dies of SIDS.

There were nine other suspected causes listed in this article but this is the only one that really made any sense.

So we never allowed the house to get TOO quiet. We always at least had a radio on.

That was nearly fifty years ago and other than having me for a father all four done alright for themselves.
 
Yes, it's awful - because even if they aren't watching it, it's background noise and is distracting.
Children need interaction with humans instead, for their learning and development!
 
Our tv is on all day long, its normally on country music videos. If its not then its on some sort of children show on PBS. While my daughter watches it sometimes its mostly just background sound for us. She is very smart and speaks perfectly fine. If we do watch we watch tv together and talk about whats going on.
 
I heard that statement too. I hardly ever watched tv but I was one to constantly keep it on for background noise. When I heard that statement, the tv went off.
 
Live and let live. It's common knowledge that lots of TV isn't good for children. But there are new studies out every 5 seconds. Everything in moderation, I say.
 
Back
Top