According to a study released today by Pediatrics, University of Washington's Dimitri A. Christakis has found that children may be watching significantly more television than previously reported─because those earlier assessments didn't include television watching during day care.
Surveying 168 owners and directors of child care facilities located across the nation, Christakis discovered that television-watching is a hallmark of day care─especially for home-based day-care providers.
Despite the fact that the American Academy of Pediatrics warns that children under 2shouldn't watch any television, 12 percent of the home-based facilities reported that they regularly have infants in front of the television. Over half of the home-based programs reported that toddlers watched television while in their care; 70 percent of them said that the preschoolers were in front of the boob tube. (Comparatively, no childcare centers reported infants watching television, and "only" 32 percent had preschoolers watching television.)
The amount of television the kids were watching is stunning as well. For example, a third of the toddlers watch television for more than two hours a day; 17 percent of the kids were watching for somewhere between five and 10 hours each day. And that's just at day care: it doesn't include any television viewing at their actual homes.
And Christakis actually thinks that these are underreports─that the kids are actually spending more time in front of the television than the day-care providers were willing to admit.
If that isn't jaw-dropping enough, consider that Christakis didn't measure the length of time that a child was actually at the facility. We don't know for sure, but, conceivably, for some of these children, being parked in front of the television could be the only activity they do all day.
According to Census data, 727,000 children (aged zero to 5) spend their days in the type of home-based care that Christakis is describing.
That's a lot of television.
