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Report Ties Children’s Use of Media to
Their Health
Brian
Stelter
The New York Times
December 1, 2008
The National Institutes of Health and a nonprofit
advocacy group, Common Sense Media, have another reason
for President-elect Barack Obama to keep urging parents
to “turn off the TV.”
In what researchers call the first report of its kind, a
review of 173 studies about the effects of media
consumption on children asserts that a strong
correlation exists between greater exposure and adverse
health outcomes.
“Coach potato does, unfortunately, sum it up pretty
well,” said Ezekiel J. Emanuel, chairman of the
bioethics department at the institutes’ clinical center,
one of the study’s five reviewers.
The report should compel lawmakers to underwrite media
education efforts and public service advertising
campaigns and should motivate the entertainment industry
to be more “responsible and responsive,” said Jim Steyer,
the chief executive of Common Sense Media, which helped
to finance the study.
“The research is clear that exposure to media has a
variety of negative health impacts on children and
teens,” he said.
Dr. Emanuel, Mr. Steyer and others plan to brief
Washington policy makers on the study on Tuesday. Joined
by researchers at Yale University and California Pacific
Medical Center, Dr. Emanuel’s team analyzed almost 1,800
studies conducted since 1980 and identified 173 that met
the criteria the researchers set.
In a clear majority of those studies more time with
television, films, video games, magazines, music and the
Internet was linked to rises in childhood obesity,
tobacco use and sexual behavior. A majority also showed
strong correlations — what the researchers deemed
“statistically significant associations” — with drug and
alcohol use and low academic achievement.
The evidence was somewhat less indicative of a
relationship between media exposure and
attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, the seventh
health outcome that was studied.
Dr. Emanuel, whose brother, Rahm, is the
president-elect’s chief of staff, said he was surprised
by how lopsided the findings were. “We found very few
studies that had any positive association” for
children’s health, he said.
Researchers sought to look at the health effects of a
wide array of media and distill 30 years of research
into a simple message. “The average parent doesn’t
understand that if you plop your kids down in front of
the TV or the computer for five hours a day, it can
change their brain development, it can make them fat,
and it can lead them to get involved in risky sexual
activity at a young age,” Mr. Steyer said.
Acknowledging that socioeconomic status and other
factors can affect children’s health, Dr. Emanuel said
the researchers chose studies that controlled for
outside variables and ranked the strength of evidence
accordingly.
Mr. Steyer said he was surprised to find an absence of
research into the impact of new technologies. “Media has
evolved at a dizzying pace, but there’s almost no
research about Facebook, MySpace, cellphones, et
cetera,” he said.
His organization, which was founded in 2003 and provides
family-oriented reviews and ratings of Web sites,
television shows and video games, intends to push for
more research into the media’s effects on children and
the setting of limits on advertising to children.
Mr. Obama has shown interest in the subject, telling
parents to “turn off the television set and put the
video games away” in speeches and running a commercial
during the campaign, “Turn It Off,” that focused on
education.
While Dr. Emanuel wouldn’t say if the study was a
subject at Thanksgiving dinner with his brother, he said
that more research into media’s effects on children’s
health was necessary.
“We have to be concerned about what’s on TV, but we also
have to be concerned about how much of the day kids are
actually interacting with TV and other media,” he said. |
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