Thursday, September 15, 2011

Please no more Sponge Bob!

Last spring we spent a few days in San Fransisco and in the hotel I let my son watch tv (at home we don't have cable, we let him watch some carefully chosen dvd's but not tv). He watched Sponge Bob. I remember paying attention how he seemed to go wild after the program and was acting really fast and kind of aggressive afterwards. I thought: Never again Sponge Bob to my kids. I have stuck to that promise and I am glad because today I read this on Facebook:

SpongeBob impairs little kids' thinking, study finds

[...] "To test what those might be, Lillard and Peterson randomly assigned 60 4-year-olds to three groups: one that watched nine minutes of a fast-paced, "very popular fantastical cartoon about an animated sponge that lives under the sea;" one that watched nine minutes of slower-paced programming from a PBS show "about a typical U.S. preschool-aged boy;" and a third group that was asked to draw for nine minutes with markers and crayons.

Immediately after their viewing and drawing tasks were complete, the kids were asked to perform four tests to assess executive function. Unfortunately for the denizens of Bikini Bottom, the kids who watched nine minutes of the frenetic high jinks of the "animated sponge" scored significantly worse than the other kids" [...] Read the whole article from here.

Same day I also read from Mothering blog that a new study finds that early TV watching has detrimental impact on literacy and language skills. This is because there is then less contact and talking with the parents. I don't think this last study is such new information but still, reading these both harmful TV related news today made me decide that today Miio isn't watching any dvd's. I will have to restrict it even more and same applies to little Leo in future.

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