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Excessive TV viewing linked to poor school readiness skills among low-income children
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For children raised in middle-class to lower class families, school readiness is negatively impacted by increased time spent watching television, an impact intensified as the income of the family decreased.
“Previous research has suggested that children in lower socioeconomic status homes watch less educational and more entertainment programming than their more affluent peers. This is troubling in that entertainment and developmentally inappropriate television viewing are negatively associated with the development of early academic skills,” Clancy Blair, PhD, from the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development at New York University, and colleagues wrote. “In addition, parents in lower as opposed to higher SES homes may be less available because of work or other demands to effectively mediate children’s media use.”
Although the researchers note the negative correlation between excessive viewing of television during childhood and school readiness, they specifically wanted to evaluate whether a family’s socioeconomic status or family income affected this outcome.
Blair and colleagues examined data from parents of children (n=807) starting kindergarten in 2008 and 2009, who provided the number of hours their child spent watching television as well as their family income. These children, who came from diverse family backgrounds, were then tested in their math skills, knowledge of letters and words and executive function. A cross-sectional analysis was used on the data provided.
Although viewing habits that exceed the AAP recommended guidelines showed a negative correlation regarding math abilities and executive function, letter and word knowledge was not affected negatively.
Data demonstrated that as lower incomes were reported and more hours spent watching television occurred, the negative association increased as a linear function. The negative connection between math skills and television viewing was seen to be somewhat resolved with executive function skills.
“It is possible that more television programming, especially educational programming, is targeted toward improving the literacy of young children. Previous investigations have found that some programming, such as Sesame Street, shows positive to neutral effects on children’s literacy skills in a variety of contexts,” Blair and colleagues wrote. “Although our dataset contains no information on the types of programs to which children were exposed, nor the conditions under which children watched television, both are likely relative to our findings. It may be that children in our sample in lower income as opposed to higher income homes are exposed to less educational and potentially enriching television content.” —by Katherine Bortz
Disclosure: The researchers report no relevant financial disclosures.
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