Too much TV may impair kids' speech

The study published Monday in the 'Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine' says that as children spend more time watching TV they communicate less with their parents, thus suffering delay in language and brain development.

Kids vocalize less while watching TV
Study authors believe that children virtually stop talking to their parents while watching TV, even if they are sitting in the same room, which can impair their social, cognitive and language development.

"We've known that television exposure during infancy is associated with language delays and attentional problems, but so far it has remained unclear why," said the study's lead author Dimitri Christakis, a professor at the University of Washington.

"This study is the first to demonstrate that when the television is on, there is reduced speech in the home. Infants vocalize less and their caregivers also speak to them more infrequently."

How the research was conducted
Christakis and colleagues reached their findings after studying 329 children, ages 2 months to 4 years. The team fitted children with business card-sized digital recorders that recorded everything they heard or said, one day a month for an average of six months.

Using noise-detection software, which could differentiate TV content from human voices, the research team compared the number of words spoken each by the adult and the child when televisions were on or off.

What the researchers found
After examining the data, Christakis’ team found that TV-viewing tends to decrease babies' likelihood of learning new words and interacting with others.

They found that for every hour in front of the television, adults spoke 770 fewer words to children. According to them, adult people typically utter approximately 941 words per hour, but that number decreased to 770 words when the TV was on, a 7 percent decrease compared to the average number of words parents spoke to kids in households where a TV is not on.

The researchers also found an association between watching TV and significant reductions in child vocalizations.

"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 not interacting with their infant in a discernible manner," the researchers said.

A whopping 30 percent of American households admitted they keep their television sets on all the time, even when no one is watching. The American Academy of Pediatrics has suggested people not to allow babies less than two years of age to watch television.

"There is simply nothing better for early childhood language acquisition than the spoken and imitated words of caregivers, and every word counts," Christakis said. "Television is not only a poor caregiver substitute, but it actually reduces the number of language sounds and words babies hear, vocalize and therefore learn. We are increasingly technologizing infancy, which may prove harmful to the next generation of adults."

Calling Christakis’ findings an “excellent, creative” work, Victor Strasburger, a professor of pediatrics at the University of New Mexico, said it is the seventh study to suggest that viewing a lot of TV impairs children's language development.

"We need to avoid parking babies in front of screens," Strasburger says. "Parents need to realize they need to be the primary entertainment for their babies. Parents are movie stars when their kids are babies. It doesn't last long."