What Does Television Do?
Since Greg Anrig's gone and done the unthinkable by bringing up some actual data, I think it's worth pointing out a few things about the Kaiser Family Foundation study he mentions. The parts of the report that seem to have gotten press attention were the ones showing that kids consume more media than ever before, and that parents are worried about this. Less heralded was the finding that the increased media consumption comes entirely from higher levels of multitasking -- watching TV while using your computer, like I do all the time at home -- rather than media actually taking up more hours of the day. Even less heralded was the research into what the consequences of all this are -- not so bad.
Kaiser found that "although kids reporting the lowest grades also tend to report the highest levels of media exposure . . .this relationship is not statistically significant." This contradicts earlier research, and what's changed is that high-achieving children nowadays consume more media than they used to. It appears that "as media become more and more integrated into the lives of young people, the differences once located by academic performance are attenuating."
Discontented kids report watching more television, listening to more music, and reading more books than do average-contentedment children. The survey they did wasn't able to draw any conclusions about the direction of causation here. Do books, music, and TV shows make kids unhappy, or do unhappy kids spend more time reading books? In the absence of real information, I'll generalize from my own experience and suggest that people usually watch a lot of television due to a lack of other, more appealing options, rather than TV driving discontentment. But who knows?
Meanwhile "Adolescents high in media exposure spend more time with their friends, more time doing chores, and more time working at a job than do those classed as low or moderate in media exposure, again indicating that high media exposure does not necessarily go hand in hand with less time devoted to other activities." Similarly, "the 20% of all 8- to 18-year-olds classed as high in overall media exposure spend more time than their low-and/or moderate-exposure counterparts hanging out with parents, exercising, and participating in other activities such as clubs, music, art, or hobbies. In each instance, high-exposure kids spend significantly more time than low-exposure kids with the three non-media activities; moderate-exposure kids do not differ from high-exposure kids in time spent with parents, but do devote less time to from high-exposure kids in time spent with parents, but do devote less time to exercize and "other" activities."
Television, video games, and music don't crowd out reading. Instead, "Heavy print users report two hours more exposure to all other media than light print users (and 1:44 more than moderate print users)."
Clearly, none of that is conclusive. Still, it seems to suggest that the "revealed preferences" of the American parent for not really doing much of anything to clamp down on TV consumption have a certain wisdom to them. Pointing that out seems like a dubious political strategy, but it's well-worth keeping in mind. By contrast, the effects on child well-being of growing up in a poor household are large and unambiguous.
June 10, 2005 9:42 AM | Reply | Permalink
"Kids these days."
Every generation thinks the next one is going to hell in a handbasket -- listening to the wrong music, watching too much TV, exposed to too much prurient material, etc.
And they're pretty much always full of shit.
It's amazing to me that this generation of parents, which grew up during a period of youth rebellion, regurgitates the exact same stuff, almost word for word.
And it's amazing to me that the intelligent lefties elsewhere on this site accept and embrace it. They saw it as bullshit when they were kids, and trust me, it's still bullshit.
Poverty hurts kids. The fact that they consume more and different kinds of media does not and has not ever hurt kids. Parents just don't understand -- and I say that as a parent.
June 10, 2005 9:45 AM | Reply | Permalink
I don't think television is all that bad for kids.
It is scary to watch toddlers watch TV. They are often transfixed and look like zombies. But, that is because they are interested. They never saw this stuff before.
The"revealed preferences" about TV for todddlers is complicated because turning the TV on is an easy way to entertain toddlers and parents feel guilty about it.
June 10, 2005 10:01 AM | Reply | Permalink
I would have been more impressed by the finding of a lack of an association between TV and academic achievement if they had a better measure of academic achievement. What they have is kids' self-reports about their grades.
June 10, 2005 10:35 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks to Anon TPM Cafe Denizen. I was having trouble putting a thought along those lines into words. My daughter is 19 months old and LOVES Sesame Street. At times, she is just mesmerized by it, and you are right, I feel guilty. Of course, when she isn't feeling well (like yesterday) and just wants to sit on my lap and watch Elmo, I don't feel bad about letting her watch. And when she spouts off the alphabet, counts to 10, and makes all her different animals sounds, I don't feel bad at all. Of course, she doesn't sit in front of the tv all day, she only watches Sesame Street, and we play and interact with her all the time. TV isn't the problem. Perhaps the types of programming are problematic, perhaps the amount time consumed is problematic, I don't know about that. But TV itself is not all that bad.
June 10, 2005 10:52 AM | Reply | Permalink
Greg: Yes, to be fair, that Kaiser study shows a mild link between TV watching and "acting up"-type behavioral problems, and some other stuff I read on their site yesterday spelled that out in more detail. And the TV-obesity link is clear and has pretty obvious sources. But the obesity thing, at least, clearly doesn't have anything to do with the nature of the content on TV. Again, though, socio-economic status are much more important for those kinds of outcomes than is television.
But at the end of the day, it is about values not cold, hard, research data.
June 10, 2005 11:21 AM | Reply | Permalink
The results are based on self-reporting. The summary could be that adolescents high in media exposure:
- vistit friends more
- do more chores
- read more books
- exercise more
- wisit with parents more.
Or it could just be that kids who exaggerate in one dimension - media exposure - also misreport in other areas as well. Color me skeptical.
Don N.
June 10, 2005 12:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
"averagely-contented"?
June 10, 2005 12:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
"This contradicts earlier research,"
does not follow from
" 'although kids reporting the lowest grades also tend to report the highest levels of media exposure . . .this relationship is not statistically significant.' "
To contradict earlier research you would need to show a significant change in the correlation bwtween media exposure and grades. It is possible to see if the new study contradicts earlier research. The claim would follow from say
"the null that the negative relationship between media exposure and grades is identicial to the negative relationship found in (earlier study 1) can be rejected at the 5% level"
Although "contradicts" would still be a strong word. It is not possible to draw such a conclusion about the null that the relationship is the same as it was by comparing tests of the null that there is no relationship. A change from significan to insignifiant is often not significant itself.
The purely hypothetical interpretation which someone might make (I'm not saying that someone is Matt Yglesias) of insignificant evidence for the alternative hypothesis that media exposure is associated with low grades as evidence against that hypothesis would be an elementary error in statistics.
This error is made almost as often as I beg for links see http://rjwaldmann.blogspot.com/2005/05/rejecting-alternative-ii-e lementary.html
June 10, 2005 7:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
To address the substance: ie should parents block the schlock or doesn't it matter?
The question is one of choice. (So many of them are, aren't they?) What annoys people (parents or kids) is the lack of control over what they're getting. The control issues are different, opposed even, but people everywhere hate to be told what to watch/read/play/whatever. The parents aren't hearing the defense of free speech. They just want their finger, not somebody else's, on the remote. When it's our own viewing, whether we're under- or over-age, nobody cares that inputs could shape outputs or that our own minds could get bent. We just want our own fingers on the remote.
The argument is more about who decides than what to watch, and we can probably take a line through previous arguments about older media to see how this one will play out.
June 10, 2005 8:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
Does anyone out there really think that a watching lot of TV every day is good for kids? Do any of you have memories similar to these? Eating dinner with the TV on so that the whole family is silently shoveling food into their mouths while watching gilligan's island reruns? Getting up at seven on saturday morning to watch cartoons and watching until dinner time? Watching shows you don't really like because a show you like a little bit is on afterwards? Watching reruns of shows you have seen four or five times before because that's what you watch at that time of the day?
Also, how many of you have that drugged feeling when you sit down in front of the tv? I think TV is a drug. The observable effects are similar to any depresent. When you sit down to watch TV, it's an abdication of responsibility to entertain yourself, a service provided in exchage for either cash in the case of cable and exposing yourself to commercials or a just commercials in the case of network TV. And after providing for the survival of youself and your family, I think entertaining yourself, doing things that are meaningfull and important to yourself, is the most important task in this life.
I'm not saying there is nothing good on TV, I'm saying that as a generic activity, TV watching--like any other drug-- is harmful in large quanitites. What was it that was quoted in a previous post--something about kids watching 5 hours a day? Five hours a day! That's insane.
There is all kinds of evidence of the problems created by tv watching. Society has been vastly changed by two things, the car and the television. Large categories of social life and recreational activites that existed fifty years ago are mostly dissapearing. These activites depended on qualities that we suppsosedly value: Community, ingenuity, resourcefulness, imagination, apreciation of nature. I think these qualities are rightly valued and, although I really have no idea what will happen, I fear that we may really miss what atrophying.
June 10, 2005 10:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
Sorry about the lack of paragraphs on the previous post. I forgot to select my mode of comment. Shouldn't the comments be set to a defualt that recognizes the regular return ascii character, like every other comment field?
June 10, 2005 10:32 PM | Reply | Permalink