TV & Kids
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no television at all for children under the age of 2, and for older children, one to two hours a day of educational programming at most. Studies have linked greater amounts of TV viewing to attention deficit disorder, violent behavior, obesity, poor performance in school and on standardized tests, etc. (Kids watch an average of around four hours of TV a day.)
However, most of these studies simplistically compare kids who watch TV and kids who don’t, when kids in those 2 groups live in very different environments. (Kids who watch little or no TV, as a group are from much wealthier families.)
A study (”Does Television Rot Your Brain? New Evidence from the Coleman Study“) by Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro analyzed the impact of the arrival of TV in various US cities, some of which had TV by 1940, while others didn’t get it until the early ’50s. (Children with TVs watched TV for close to 4 hours a day by 1950.)
For example, children born in 1947 who grew up in Denver, where the first TV broadcasting began in 1952, had not watched much TV until the age of 5. But a child born the same year in Seattle could watch from the age of 1.
Also, Denver kids who were in sixth grade in 1965 had spent their whole lives with TV, while their 12th-grade counterparts hadn’t.
Gentzkow and Shapiro got 1965 test-score data for almost 300,000 kids. After controlling for socioeconomic status, there were no significant test-score differences between kids who lived in cities that got TV earlier as opposed to later, or between kids of pre- and post-TV-age cohorts. Nor did the kids differ significantly in the amount of homework they did, dropout rates, or the wages they eventually made. If anything, the data revealed a small positive uptick in test scores for kids who got to watch more television when they were young. For kids living in households in which English was a second language, or with a mother who had less than a high-school education, the study found that TV had a more sizable positive impact on test scores in reading and general knowledge.