Howdy Doody Time: Young Children & TV

Mine was the first generation to grow up with television. The fact that I can still remember the names of my favorite characters speaks to the potential power of the medium. There was Howdy Doody, the cowboy with 48 freckles; Clarabelle the Clown, who honked; Princess Summerfall Winterspring; and Chief Thunderthud of "Kawabonga" fame. And there was Beanie and Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent who sailed the Leakin Lena to far-off places like Ashcanastan, and No Bikini Atoll. And who could forget Crusader Rabbit, or the coronation of Elizabeth II, live from London?

Questions about the effects of television watching were being asked even as families unpacked their first sets. My mother was the cautious type and so my brother and I were only allowed to watch 30 minutes of television each day. You can imagine how vigorously we debated the merits of various programs. We were in grade school before our TV first arrived, but today television watching begins early. Preschoolers watch an average of 2 to 3 hours of television daily and even toddlers are likely to be watching programs like Teletubbiescreated just for them. One research team reports that 58% of children younger than 2 years watch television every day for an average of 1.3 hours (Zimmerman & Christakis, 2005). What are the consequences and implications of this much television viewing? After nearly 50 years of living with "the tube," what have we learned?

The Effects of Watching TV: Then and Now

Throughout the 70s and 80s, the thrust of the literature was to explore the potential of television as an instructional tool. In one illustrative study, Mabel Rice and her colleague in Kansas measured rates of learning for a small number of new words, which were presented in the context of video narratives (Rice & Woodsmall, 1988). Each of the new words appeared five times in a 6 to 7 minute narrative film. Afterwards, children who had this exposure to the new words could comprehend them better than children who had not heard them in the video. The researchers concluded that more research studies of this sort should make it possible to design television programming that would enhance children's learning as well as entertain them.

Contrast that optimism with the 1999 recommendation from the American Academy of Pediatrics that children under the age of 2 should not watch television at all. As summarized in a useful review paper by Anderson and Pempek (2005), the facilitating effects of television viewing have been more difficult to prove than was once expected, and there is now some evidence that television viewing can actually hinder development, particularly for very young children. Here is a sampling of recent work.

Researchers at the University of Washington (Zimmerman & Christakis, 2005) used a large national archive to measure the outcomes of television viewing in some 11,000 children. Yearly interviews with the children's mothers had included reports of their television viewing habits. From this information the researchers determined the amount of television viewing for each child during the years before 3, and from 3 to 5 years. These two variables were then correlated with scores on the Wechsler digit span test, and on the Peabody Individual Achievement Test subtests for reading recognition, reading comprehension, and mathematics. An unusual feature of this study was that the children's mothers themselves had been followed longitudinally from age 14 so the researchers could control for a variety of maternal variables, including educational level, general aptitude, race/ethnicity, multilingualism, and the degree to which the child's home could be characterized as intellectually stimulating. Using sophisticated multiple regression analyses, the researchers found that television viewing before age 3 was associated with a "deleterious effect" on digit span, mathematics, reading recognition, and reading comprehension. Relationships for older preschoolers were different. Television viewing showed no significant association with reading recognition, mathematics, or short-term memory, and was positively associated with an increase in reading comprehension.