7. Hindrance of Intellectual Development
The doctors' chief objection to television is that it stunts intellectual growth. A close connection between TV-viewing and academic performance has seemed probable ever since SAT scores dropped sharply in the late 60s and throughout the 70s. The students taking the SAT in those years were the first whose preschool lives had included television. In recent years, studies explicitly probing the relationship between TV-viewing and academic performance have found a substantial negative correlation (2). One recent study found that TV-viewing during childhood is a predictor of education attained by age 26, with more viewing associated with less education (3).
Television so radically restructures a child's experience that it probably undermines learning from many different directions. We will list six distinct threats that it poses to a child's intellectual growth.
1. Television steals time from educationally profitable activities. The activities that suffer decline while TV-viewing increases include homework, creative play, and recreational reading (4). It is fair to suppose that such activities outside school support both learning and performance within school.
2. Television causes attentional problems. Educators have long suspected that early TV-viewing accounts for the explosion in our generation of ADD and like disorders (5). In a landmark study in 2004, Christakis, Zimmerman, DiGiuseppe, and McCarty showed for the first time a definite linkage between TV-viewing and symptoms of ADD. Specifically, they found that TV-viewing at ages 1 and 3 separately increase the probability of attentional problems at age 7 (6). Although these findings have not gone unchallenged, they have received strong support from a stream of subsequent studies (7). Television's degrading effect upon attention might involve several different mechanisms. The memory of highly stimulating entertainment may simply interfere with concentration on humdrum tasks. Or the many attention-grabbing devices used by television may be a sort of mental candy fostering an addiction that leaves a child restless when the available stimulation is unsatisfying. Or the causal mechanism may be more fundamental, having to do with the development of brain function and structure.
3. TV-viewing disrupts sleep. Several studies confirm this generalization (8). Video games may be worse in this respect than television (9). Lack of good sleep must surely be detrimental to learning.
4. TV-viewing blocks retention of academic knowledge and skills. Although research has not yet addressed this issue, it seems likely that an evening of exciting television after a day in school will make the day's learning harder to recall. We may theorize that the brain organizes memory so that the most important things are most accessible, and that it attaches the most importance to whatever is most arresting and absorbing.
5. Television has an especially adverse effect upon the acquisition of language skills. The effect is probably mediated in at least five ways
- Television hinders language learning by reducing the child to a strictly passive role. Instead of engaging in conversation, a child in front of a television merely listens to somebody else talk. As a result, long hours before a television deprive a child of two kinds of experience essential to the development of language skill. First, the child has little opportunity to practice speaking. Second, in the absence of an adult responder, he receives no helpful feedback to his speech. Adults shape, correct, guide, and prompt a child's speech in ways that increase his ability to communicate effectively. By their choice of words, they also stretch a child's vocabulary. Video entertainment has no comparable value.
- A recent study shows that the effect of a child watching television or simply hearing it in the background is to greatly reduce his own vocalizations as well as his language interaction with adults. For each hour so spent, his vocalizations diminish 25-50% and the number of adult words he hears dimi