quote:Isn't it likely that kids who are watching that much television are also not getting adequate face-to-face interaction such as reading with parents, playing with siblings, or even just being carried around and talked to while mom works? So tv itself might not be the problem; it might be that the watching tv interferes with what they should be doing.
If these are reputable studies, they almost definitely controlled for that.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
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quote:Isn't it likely that kids who are watching that much television are also not getting adequate face-to-face interaction such as reading with parents, playing with siblings, or even just being carried around and talked to while mom works? So tv itself might not be the problem; it might be that the watching tv interferes with what they should be doing.
If these are reputable studies, they almost definitely controlled for that.
I doubt that, actually. I'm not even sure how you'd control for that.
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quote:the research team found that with every hour per day spent watching baby DVDs and videos, infants learned six to eight fewer new vocabulary words than babies who never watched the videos.
The only way I can see that they would control for that is to put the kids in a silent room alone during the time the other kids were watching the videos. Otherwise it is likely they were getting social interaction.
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posted
Which would show that social interaction is better than Baby Einstein, and surely that's all the study needs to show?
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posted
They likely used regression analysis, which can control for those factors by things like including other socialization time as a factor in the equation being fitted.
Adding other factors increases the possible error, but it does not mean the situation can't be analyzed. It is tricky, though, and it does not necessarily determine a causative factor, though it would be possible to arrange a situation where causation could be inferred.
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posted
Well, they already established that social interaction is better than tv. But from that they can't assert that tv in itself damages language development without first seeing if kids who had no social interaction but no tv during that time learned words at the same rate or faster.
Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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quote:But from that they can't assert that tv in itself damages language development without first seeing if kids who had no social interaction but no tv during that time learned words at the same rate or faster.
posted
I am just awfully tired of both sides of the question. I am tired of people watching the shows that will make their children smarter, and I am tired of people telling me tv will make them dumber.
My daughter loved Barney. She loved Disney movies, and memorized them, acting out scenes at various times, usually in public, usually loud, and usually the rather horrible parts. She is brilliant. She is an amazing trombone player. She is sweet and good, and has loved school since before she went.
My son was addicted to Thomas the Tank Engine: videos, tv show, books, bedspread, trains, spoon, and bowl, clothing, Halloween costume. He is also brilliant, plays a mean guitar, and is a superb athlete.
I think we did OK.
I really think KQ hit the nail on the head. TV takes time away from being with your kids. Make sure you are with your kids.
On the other hand, some parents need a break, or they will go insane. So, it is OK to let your kids be happy watching tv for a while.
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posted
Okay, MrSquicky, they're welcome to assert it but I won't believe it.
I have kids. I have seen how important time with other people is to their development. I am not sure that kids stuck in a room with toys and no interaction except when they needed to be fed or changed would do any better than kids stuck in front of a tv and no interaction except when they need to be fed or changed.
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posted
Oh, also, I'm with Elizabeth. I let my kids watch a limited amount of tv sometimes. Not excessive, and we spend lots of time playing together and reading books and going for walks and talking about what we see and they "help" me with whatever I'm doing when I cook or do laundry or whatever. But I don't think tv in moderation is complete evil that's going to fry my kids' brains.
Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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As a non-parent, I think the whole thing is funny. I have no doubt that if I did have kids, I'd occasionally plop them in front of the television while I did my own thing. How often "occasionally" might occur I don't know, but I suspect it would be more often than once a week.
I like the conversation, though, because I think it's important to remember that it is a convenience, an occasional, a stop-gap, the equivelent of candy. Candy isn't evil, either, but it's important to remember that it isn't actually food.
Posts: 1753 | Registered: Aug 2002
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quote:Originally posted by ketchupqueen: Okay, MrSquicky, they're welcome to assert it but I won't believe it.
I have kids. I have seen how important time with other people is to their development. I am not sure that kids stuck in a room with toys and no interaction except when they needed to be fed or changed would do any better than kids stuck in front of a tv and no interaction except when they need to be fed or changed.
Actually, between the two terrible options, I'd have to venture a guess that the TV is still worse. TV doesn't just take time away from interaction. It also takes time away from exploring, touching, testing, and doing. Right now my son is attempting to get a square peg in a round hole. Won't work, right? He'll figure it out sooner or later. If I turn on the TV he may not get the chance. Interaction isn't the only way he learns. In fact, my son is pretty independent and not too big on interaction. He's much bigger on moving and problem solving.
But children, especially young children, do not learn from having images and sound blasted at them, filling their senses.
TV also has the trouble of creating the couch potato who doesn't move and therefore gets fat.
It has also been shown to be bad on vision...especially peripheral vision because you're spending so much time focused on one point.
(I'm not flip flopping...I just see both sides of this issue...everything in moderation, right?)
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posted
There's an issue as to whether or not under 2 year olds watching TV delays language development by taking time away from other things only or if there is some harmful aspect of television itself. I honestly don't know. I haven't read the research.
These people (assuming that the presentation here is accurate) are claiming that it is at least partially due to television exposure itself. There are actually ways of showing this and if they are going to make a claim like that, a reputable journal is going to make sure that they have done one of them.
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I'm not really sure what Elizabeth or kq's latest posts have to do with that though.
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posted
Eh, I find it is easier to have a discussion if I confine my rebuttals to what people have said in the conversation.
Although I seem to have replicated the event in the opening post. I'm guessing this is why Molly didn't talk to me for a week. Posts: 1753 | Registered: Aug 2002
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quote:Eh, I find it is easier to have a discussion if I confine my rebuttals to what people have said in the conversation.
I was responding to
quote:I am just awfully tired of both sides of the question. I am tired of people watching the shows that will make their children smarter, and I am tired of people telling me tv will make them dumber.
I was agreeing with her.
So thank you for that.
Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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quote:Originally posted by ketchupqueen: I don't know, based on this sentence:
quote:the research team found that with every hour per day spent watching baby DVDs and videos, infants learned six to eight fewer new vocabulary words than babies who never watched the videos.
The only way I can see that they would control for that is to put the kids in a silent room alone during the time the other kids were watching the videos. Otherwise it is likely they were getting social interaction.
I would guess, given the rules for research with human subjects, that study was more likely to involve doing a survey asking about time spent on various activities including TV/video, testing language development and then correlating the results, correcting for other variables.
I would be surprised if the people doing the study had children watch TV as part of the study.
Posts: 11187 | Registered: Sep 2005
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posted
Given that is how most studies with human subjects are conducted, they generally figure a margin of error into the equations. Assuming it is a reputable group doing the research, it is probably as accurate as any behavior = result study would be.
Ethically that is how that type of research usually has to be done. For example, if someone were doing a study on obesity and junk food, they could ask about the kid's diet and look at the results; they couldn't put kid's on an all junk food diet to see what happens.
Posts: 11187 | Registered: Sep 2005
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quote:I think if watching the toy gets the kid to sit through the music, there might be benefit to that.
You can put a CD (any CD) on while they're playing, painting, drawing, eating etc. This is not something you require a screen for. The child doesn't have to "sit and listen" to hear it.
I also find background music helps children concentrate on the task at hand. It can also make housework way much more fun.
I don't think music is a miracle cure for bringing your child up well, but I do know that playing a great variety of music and thus getting your child used to all kinds of music helps them become open-minded, educated and musically sensitive adults.
It seems obvious to me that parking your child in front of a screen instead of talking to them and interacting with them in a flexible, realistic manner is detrimental to their learning. There's nothing wrong with a bit of tv now and then, especially since it's a fairly staple part of our culture, but if you're hoping it will teach them to talk and to learn better than you can, you're probably out of luck.
I do think that trying to use television as a substitute for real interaction in the human world at the crucial ages of say 0-3 is probably damaging to the crucial learning and brain-pathway creating that goes on in that time. I should imagine that showing your baby tv is just like leaving them in a blank room for the same amount of time right at the crucial time when they need to develop their brains the most.
I certainly don't hate television, I love television shows.
Posts: 8473 | Registered: Apr 2003
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posted
Let me clarify, kmb: I am dubious about the particular results in this particular study and the accuracy in this particular case.
Diet and exercise in children as it relates to obesity is a lot different from what a kid is doing during the day and how it relates to learning; there are so many different factors I have doubts that they were able to accurately control for all of them and assert that one factor is causative in this particular situation.
Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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posted
Right. I'm just not sure why. They seem to be from a reputable university. I don't know anything other than that about this particular study, but assessing many different factors and variables is an absolutely typical part of doing this kind of research.
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posted
And let's not forget the fact that newspaper articles about scientific studies often botch a lot of facts and make unfounded claims.
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I don't really have a pony in this particulare race, I just thought I could clear up some confusion about research practices using human subjects.
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1) how much face-to-face time with your child or baby 2) how much screen time the child or baby has 3) what language developmental milestones have been reached
Actually, these were all questions on the standard First Year Well-Child checkup forms in the clinic I worked at.
It would be a simple matter to sort the data so you looked at #3 in terms of different groups based on #2, in cases matched across groups to hold #1 constant.
That is to say, #1 could easily be controlled for, and this would be a very basic thing to do for this sort of study. If it would make a differnce to someone, I would go read the cited studies and verify that this simple, reliable control was performed (or one like it). However, I am extremely busy, so unless it is of real import, I'll leave it at the possibility existing for this to have been studied well.
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Edited to add: in the case I laid out, a claim could be made that regardless of amount of face-to-face time, the amount of screen time an infant or child has is/isn't correlated with a decrease in language skills (or whatever outcomes measure was being used). Correlation does not prove causation, but it is another link in the chain, and it does place some onus on those (in the reseaerch, treatment, and/or lay community) who disagree with causation to address what other reasons for the correlation there might be, other than causation.
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Edited again to add: As kmboots noted, this is common social sciences research.
Posts: 14017 | Registered: May 2000
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posted
Ah, well, thank you. Mind you, even if the studies were done well and established that increased screen time was correlated with a lower rate of development, that doesn't mean that screen time isn't sometimes the best option for a given family in a given circumstance. It may well be the best thing for a particular child in a particular circumstance.
Posts: 14017 | Registered: May 2000
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posted
I am not sure that I can say my daughter doesn't get a great deal from the TV we let her watch. I do not know many 2.5 year olds that can use stethoscope correctly in a sentence. She can. And every time she comes out with something like that I ask her where did she learn that and invariably she replies "Curious George". She's learned a great deal from Brainy Baby as well. She can count to 25 and knows her ABC's. We also showed her a potty training video and it brought the concept home to her in a way we couldn't. I think TV/DVDs are fine as long as you also interact with your child and talk to them about what they see. Nothing can replace face to face time but I see nothing wrong augmenting that with good stuff like Sesame Street and other educational shows.
Posts: 601 | Registered: Sep 2002
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posted
Yes, but my daughter had been watching during that time frame and I do not think it effected her vocabulary development. If anything I think it helped it.
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posted
What they didn't mention is that watching TV makes kids better at watching TV...
I know, it sounds stupid, but what are we all doing right now, if not staring into a screen? I say kids today will need the ability to watch monitors and decipher what's going on.
Who talks nowadays anyway? Text is king!
Posts: 3950 | Registered: Mar 2006
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quote:Originally posted by dawnmaria: Yes, but my daughter had been watching during that time frame and I do not think it effected her vocabulary development. If anything I think it helped it.
Ditto.
Bridget learns words watching tv that we've tried and tried to teach her for MONTHS and she doesn't learn.
Emma learned some vocab from tv but more from starfall.com when she was 14-16 months old.
Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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posted
There's always the possibility that babies who prefer watching TV had bad language genes to begin with. That's the way I think it worked with my anecdotal sample. Except for my one nephew who was very talkative and would get grumpy if the show were off. He was talkative, but I can't vouch for his vocabulary size. My daughter had a large vocabulary, by mysteriously disordered syntax as a baby. I think I studied language too much and screwed up my capacity to produce baby talk. Like when the baby would talk, instead of repeating back to her, I would yell "Honey, the baby produced a voiced velar trill!" Or, you know maybe her genes were messed up. She often demonstrated a reverse epenthetic insertion in her submoraic parsing.
posted
I don't hold much store in anecdotal evidence, but if we're going to try it that way it's probably best to be fair and show it the other way. My 20-month-old has been watching some TV almost every day through the entire period in question and even now, hos vocabulary is small and his usage is smaller. We've got a list of some 30 words he has said before but when I go over the list, he hasn't used 20 of them in the last 2 months. Mostly, he says the same words he's been saying for a year...hi, mom, and dad. Oh, and hot. He really likes to tell me things are hot. Unfortunately, I must have given him too good a reaction on this word because now even his cold cereal is hot. :=)
He still does a lot of communication through baby signs, which I love because otherwise I wouldn't have any idea what he wanted.
Was it TV or something else? I don't know. He's always been hugely advanced in gross and fine motor skills. he was running well before 1 year old and using a spoon without help well before 1 year, too. Lately, he's busy learning to jump and balance and put things in very small holes. (Like the Mr. Potato Head) I like to think, then, that his uninspiring verbal skills are due to the fact that he's busy doing other things but for all I know, it's the TV.
I still don't think anecdotal evidence is good, though. There's just too much that goes into a baby's development. It is known that babies will often concentrate on one skill at a time as they develop and that they set their own priorities. They set their own schedule in general.
The truth is, TV watching or no TV watching, school aged kids can talk. I hear them all the time and I couldn't tell you who watched too much TV and who didn't. I would be far, far more interested in long-range effects of TV watching than in how many words an 8-16-month-old says. In my experience, they don't say much anyway. :=)
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posted
Christine, my daughter was talking clearly at two. She sang songs with dead-on pitch and tone.
Our son barely talked. He even went to speech in kindergarten, which was sort of silly.
When he was six, he started talking, but he is still a very quiet person, now almost eleven. He was a classic "late bloomer." And he actually ponders before he answers a question(which drives me nuts. I want an answer and I want it now!)
So, studies aside, there are people who are quiet, and people who are chatterboxes, and I am not sure how any study would be able to factor in personality.
Posts: 10890 | Registered: May 2003
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posted
If they're good, and they look at a large enough group, studies can account for a lot more than anecdotal evidence can. It doesn't make for as interesting a conversation, though.
But after giving it some thought, I still insist that the vocabulary of an 8-16-month-old isn't a very useful thing to look at. Everyone assures me that receptive language is much more important at this age anyway and in due time, they'll all talk. Even the stupidest adults can talk, after all. Posts: 2392 | Registered: Sep 2005
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posted
I don't put a lot of stock into anecdotes in this case, especially with people's own children. Obvious biases aside, I sure hope there isn't any control studies being done.
Posts: 1753 | Registered: Aug 2002
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quote:Originally posted by Elizabeth: So, studies aside, there are people who are quiet, and people who are chatterboxes, and I am not sure how any study would be able to factor in personality.
This is done through randomization. Any identifiable variables are accounted for and checked to make sure the randomization worked (e.g., that approximately the same percentages of girls are in both groups, that the socioeconomic distribution is approximately the same, etc.). Sometimes there is a more specific process of stratified randomization that can be used to ensure a more equal distribution between the groups. This is a more advanced technical matter.
Unless the other sorts of characteristics that have been brought up (such as quietness or shyness) are in some way related to the way the randomization is done -- and given that this is generally via a random number generator or the like, it is highly highly unlikely -- then they should be randomly distributed across the groups, too. You are just as likely to have some shy people in Group A as Group B, especially if we know that other identifiable variables were checked to have come out randomly distributed. (That is a double-check on the randomization process itself, and so it is not necessary to ensure every variable is randomized, merely enough to show that the process was indeed random.)
Mind you, with small sample sizes, there is more likelihood that an unusual skew will come up, even if we don't see it. (If you take 6 socks out of a bag with 10 red and 10 blue socks, it might well not be an even mix of blues and reds.) However, with large sample sizes, the likelihood of this happening approaches nil. (If you take 600 socks out of a bag with 1000 red and 1000 blue socks, it may not be an exact 50%:50% mix, but it will be very very very likely to be in the ballpark of an even distribution -- say, 48-52%:48-52%.)
This is why statistics are discussed or related in terms of confidence intervals (or, another way of looking at it, the p-value). With a large enough sample size, the likelihood that characteristics unaccounted for are not randomly distributed approaces nil, as well.
And the small bit of chance left is indeed accounted for in the assessment of the numbers.
This is not intuitively obvious, but it has been studied, double-checked, and replicated over and over for more than a 100 years. It is how statistics does work int he real world, and it has been verified over and over again. Why it works is a matter that is covered in getting an advanced degree, and so it's beyond the scope of a simple thread here. Nonetheless, it does, even if that is not intuitively obvious.
Posts: 14017 | Registered: May 2000
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quote:Originally posted by Elizabeth: So, studies aside, there are people who are quiet, and people who are chatterboxes, and I am not sure how any study would be able to factor in personality.
This is done through randomization. Any identifiable variables are accounted for and checked to make sure the randomization worked (e.g., that approximately the same percentages of girls are in both groups, that the socioeconomic distribution is approximately the same, etc.). Sometimes there is a more specific process of stratified randomization that can be used to ensure a more equal distribution between the groups. This is a more advanced technical matter.
Unless the other sorts of characteristics that have been brought up (such as quietness or shyness) are in some way related to the way the randomization is done -- and given that this is generally via a random number generator or the like, it is highly highly unlikely anyway -- then they should be randomly distributed across the groups, too. You are just as likely to have some shy people in Group A as Group B, especially if we know that other identifiable variables were checked to have come out randomly distributed. (That is a double-check on the randomization process itself, and so it is not necessary to ensure every variable is randomized, merely enough to show that the process was indeed random.)
Mind you, with small sample sizes, there is more likelihood that an unusual skew will come up, even if we don't see it. (If you take 6 socks out of a bag with 10 red and 10 blue socks, it might well not be an even mix of blues and reds.) However, with large sample sizes, the likelihood of this happening approaches nil. (If you take 600 socks out of a bag with 1000 red and 1000 blue socks, it may not be an exact 50%:50% mix, but it will be very very very likely to be in the ballpark of an even distribution -- say, 48-52%:48-52%.)
This is why statistics are discussed or related in terms of confidence intervals (or, another way of looking at it, the p-value). With a large enough sample size, the likelihood that characteristics unaccounted for are not randomly distributed approaces nil, as well.
And the small bit of chance left is indeed accounted for in the assessment of the numbers.
This is not intuitively obvious, but it has been studied, double-checked, and replicated over and over for more than a hundred years. It is how statistics does work in the real world, and it has been verified over and over again. Why it works is a matter that is covered in getting an advanced degree, and so it's beyond the scope of a simple thread here. Nonetheless, it does, even if that is not intuitively obvious.
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Edited to add: It was only during my third statistics course that I started to understand some of this. Really, it was only by working through real-life situations myself and seeing how sample size affects the analysis that I became comfortable with relying on these techniques.
posted
Probability and Statistics was one of the most useful classes I took in law school.
One of the conceptual things that helped me understand how the randomization process can be measured was the idea that we are attempting to find the probability that a result X would be obtained if the population were very different from the sample.
For example, if we have 1000 marbles, all either blue, red, or green, and pick 1 blue marble at random, we know very little about the population as a whole. We know that the probability of picking the marble is 0 if there are no blue marbles, .001 if there is 1 blue marble, and 1 if there are 1000 blue marbles.
If, however, we pick 100 blue marbles at random, we have a much better idea of the population's color characteristics as a whole. It's possible to calculate the odds that population is 10% blue, 20% blue, 100% blue, etc.
I don't know if this is useful or not, but thinking of these as probability calculations (which I have a better intuitive grasp of than I do of statistics) really helped me in that class.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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posted
Wow. My mom let us watch two hours of television when we were young (Sesame street), and we turned out okay. Me and another one of my sisters both were speaking at the age of 2... Forming sentences, not just saying 'mommy' or 'daddy'.
Of course... My brother *did* have a stutter until he was about 8 years old, and my other sister made up her own words for everything (I was 'caw-caw')
Hmmmm. Something to ponder.
Posts: 438 | Registered: May 2006
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quote:Originally posted by Javert Hugo: I don't put a lot of stock into anecdotes in this case, especially with people's own children. Obvious biases aside, I sure hope there isn't any control studies being done.
And I hope that when I am insulted in a condescending way, the insulter has the ability to form a grammatically correct insult.
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