Toddlers, TV, and troubling behavior

Cognitive Daily reports that boys who watch violent children’s programming while toddlers (and we’re talking Disney here, not Texas Chainsaw Massacre) are four times as likely at age 7-9 to be in the top 10% of boys with behavioral problems.

…toddlers who are allowed to watch entertainment shows (as opposed to educational TV, and including violent shows) are significantly more likely to develop attention problems when they’re older.

But does violent TV have other impacts? In a separate study, the same researchers — Dimitri Christakis and Frederick Zimmerman — took a look at the same 1997 survey results and a 2002 follow up of families with small children (330 kids in all). The kids were age 18 months to 5 years old in 1997. This time in addition to TV-watching, the researchers looked at parents’ reports of antisocial behavior of their kids when they were older. The parents rated their kids on a scale of 1 to 3 for six different statements: “My child cheats, is mean to others, feels no regret, is destructive, is disobedient at school, and has trouble with teachers.” Based on these responses, they divided the kids into two groups — those whose antisocial behavior was problematic (corresponding to the 90th percentile of antisocial behavior in the general population), and those who showed normal social behavior.

Next they analyzed the TV-watching habits of these kids to see if TV-watching (including both live TV and videos like Disney movies) predicted antisocial behavior. Here are the results:

The results are expressed in terms of an odds ratio — in this case, the chance of developing antisocial behavior compared to not developing antisocial behavior five years later. An odds ratio of 1 signifies that there is no relationship between the two items compared. Preschool boys who watched violent videos when they were younger were significantly more likely to have problematic antisocial behavior at age 7-9. There was no significant relationship between any type of TV watching for girls and antisocial behavior, and nonviolent TV wasn’t related to antisocial behavior in boys (though with a larger sample, this result might have risen to significance).

Read the rest of the post here…

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