What is it now, you ask? A recent study into parents, toddlers, and attentiveness has led to expected results. Science Daily includes the journal information at the bottom of their report on it for those interested in seeking the whole thing out.
The researchers studied about 50 1-, 2-, and 3-year-olds, each of whom was with one parent, at a university child study center. Half of the one-hour session, parents and children were in a playroom without TV; in the other half-hour, parents chose an adult-directed program to watch (such as Jeopardy!). The researchers observed how often parents and children talked with each other, how actively involved the parents were in their children’s play, and whether parents and children responded to each other’s questions and suggestions.
When the TV was on, the researchers found, both the quantity and the quality of interactions between parents and children dropped. Specifically, parents spent about 20 percent less time talking to their children and the quality of the interactions declined, with parents less active, attentive, and responsive to their youngsters.
Were they studying TV as a background attention catcher, or parents’ attentiveness while physically watching TV? It’s not completely a TV’s fault parents don’t pay attention, if that’s the direction they were going here. Similar results probably would have happened had the activity been housework, food prep, or any other random every day thing a parent does. Parents can’t possibly devote 100% attention to their child every moment of the day. Maybe TV is an added distraction, but it would never be the sole cause of parent-child interpersonal dysfunction. There are always more factors in play, more forces at work.
Not every parent would automatically pop the TV on to fill silence in a room. Some parents are naturally more intuitive and play well with their children and give them plenty of fun and functional activities and a lot of opportunities for talking back and forth. Other parents might rely more on siblings to fill attention gaps, much to the thrill of siblings, I’m sure. Maybe they’re relying on daycare or babysitters or nannies to provide the necessary socialization because they don’t have the time or inclination. We don’t know.
I’d be curious to see how the selection process worked. Did they get samples from enough kinds of families? Rich, poor, working class, etc? Would ethnicity skew these results at all? What about size of town they live in? Would the channel matter? Were they picking families that already admitted to high television use, or did they mix it up to include some that rarely watch, too? What if a parent picked Much Music Retro instead of a Q&A quiz show? Could they see the TV or just hear it? How was “level of interaction” determined in order to figure out how much less there was when the TV was on? Did volume play a role? Too many questions for the amount of information we have, sadly.
If this study is going to be worth a nod, it’ll have to be tried again with a bigger pool than 50 kids, surely? It’s evidence of a trend, but what else can really be said about it?
