What Is The Impact of Television On Children
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juma emmanuelWhat Is The Impact of Television On Children
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What is the impact of television on children’s cognitive well-being?
Thesis: The impact of television viewing on children’s cognitive well-being depends
on the quality of content and the quantity of hours spent on viewing and is mediated by
factors such as age and parental oversight.
Various studies exploring the relationship between television viewing and children
have presented contradictory results. For example, Christakis et al. (2004) found that every
hour of television watching at age one is associated with a 28% increase in attention issues by
the age of seven, with these impacts manifesting in later adulthood. However, the revision of
the dataset used by Christakis et al. (2004) in a 2010 study by Foster and Watkins found that
the risk of adulthood inattention problem was only significant for 10% of the participants
who watched at least seven hours of television daily. Other studies like Obel et al. (2004)
found no significant cognitive and behavioral effects of watching television. The results of
these studies are mixed, showing that further evaluation is needed to reach certain
conclusions.
Studies on the impact of television viewing on children’s brain development are also
scarce. The study by Takeuchi et al. (2015) found a positive correlation between television
viewing and intelligence, and a negative correlation regarding sensorimotor development.
Lee et al. (2017), on the other hand, found that parental involvement in viewing at least twice
a week enhanced the child’s linguistic and cognitive skills. Studies by Wright et al. (2001)
found that watching educational content was beneficial to children from low- and middle-
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income families, but Anderson et al. (2001) found that the amount of time spent on
educational content did not predict academic performance.
In summary, the findings so far on the impact of television viewing among children is
mixed. While there are some benefits to watching television, prolonged viewing is cautioned
to be detrimental to cognitive development. Parental involvement is strongly recommended to
regulate television consumption and ensure that the content is age-suitable, educational, and
positively impacting the child’s cognitive development.
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Works Cited
Anderson, D. et al. (2001), “Early childhood television viewing and adolescent behavior: the
recontact study.” Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, Vol.
66/1, pp. I-VIII, 1-147, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11326591
Lee, E., J. Spence and V. Carson (2017), “Television viewing, reading, physical activity and
brain development among young South Korean children”, Journal of Science and
Medicine in Sport, Vol. 20/7, pp. 672-677,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/J.JSAMS.2016.11.014
Lee, E., J. Spence and V. Carson (2017), “Television viewing, reading, physical activity and
brain development among young South Korean children”, Journal of Science and
Medicine in Sport, Vol. 20/7, pp. 672-677,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/J.JSAMS.2016.11.014
Obel, C. et al. (2004), “Does Children's Watching of Television Cause Attention Problems?
Retesting the Hypothesis in a Danish Cohort”, PEDIATRICS, Vol. 114/5, pp. 1372-
1373, http://dx.doi.org/10.1542/peds.2004-0954.
Takeuchi, H. et al. (2015), “The impact of television viewing on brain structures: Cross-
sectional and longitudinal analyses”, Cerebral Cortex, Vol. 25/5, pp. 1188-1197,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bht315
Wright, J. et al. (2001), “The Relations of Early Television Viewing to School Readiness and
Vocabulary of Children from Low-Income Families: The Early Window Project”,
Child Development, Vol. 72/5, pp. 1347-1366, http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-
8624.t01-1-00352.
