December 13,2012: A study published Tuesday found that children with televisions in their bedrooms tend to be fatter compared to children who have TVs in common living areas.
According to Melissa Healy for the Los Angeles Times, the screen time a kid logs in his or her bedroom is linked, hour-for-hour, to more belly fat, higher triglycerides and overall greater risk of developing heart disease and diabetes.
These findings come when 70% of kids ages 8-18 already have televisons in their bedrooms.
The study's lead author, Amanda E. Staiano a researcher with the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana, suggests that placing a television in a child's bedroom can have corrosive effects on their health.
The study looked at 369 youth between the ages of 5 and 18. The researchers measured the kids' waist circumference, blood pressure and fasting triglycerides; ran a full cholesterol panel; and gauged each child's fat mass in two ways to get precise measures of subcutaneous fat, fat accumulated in the belly and around visceral organs, and overall fat-to-lean mass ratio. And they tested each child's fasting glucose level -- a measure of metabolic function. The researchers also had participants estimate their daily physical activity levels of food intake.
The study found that of children who watch more than two hours of TV a day, those who had a TV in their bedroom were as much as 2 1/2 times likelier to be in the top one-quarter of kids in terms of fat mass. That finding held steady even after researchers adjusted for age, gender, ethnicity, physical activity levels and diet. Compared to kids who watched TV in a living area of the home, those who had a TV in their room were almost three times likelier to have "elevated cardiometabolic risk," meaning they had three or more unhealthy readings in the panels of medical tests they were given.
Sheer volume of TV time mattered too: Kids who watched five or more hours of TV a day were twice as likely as those who watched less to carry a density of visceral fat that fell in the top quartile.
"Research has consistently shown better outcomes for kids who don’t have a TV in their bedroom than for those who do, whether we’re talking about obesity, sleep or academic achievement." Said Vicky Rideout, who has written some of the most detailed studies of children's media exposure and its effects for the Kaiser Family Foundation.
(See story below for more on children's television watching and sleep problems.)
Written by: Taylor McCulloch
July 6, 2011: In a
report, "Media Use and Child Sleep: The Impact of Content, Timing and Environment," by Michelle Garrison, Kimberly Liekweg, and Dimitri Christakis, released on July 1 in
Pediatrics, the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, the researchers determined that watching television or internet media, especially that with violent content, contributes to children's sleep problems.
... Media use has been shown to negatively affect a child's sleep, especially in the context of evening use or with a television in the child's bedroom. However, little is known about how content choices and adult co-use affect this relationship.....data were collected in the baseline survey and media diary of a randomized controlled trial on media use in children aged 3 to 5 years. Sleep measures were derived from the Children's Sleep Habits Questionnaire. Media diaries captured time, content title, and co-use of television, video-game, and computer usage; titles were coded for ratings, violence, scariness, and pacing. Nested linear regression models were built to examine the impact of timing, content, and co-use on the sleep problem score....
... On average, children consumed 72.9 minutes of media screen time daily, with 14.1 minutes occurring after 7:00 PM. Eighteen percent of parents reported at least 1 sleep problem; children with a bedroom television consumed more media and were more likely to have a sleep problem. In regression models, each additional hour of evening media use was associated with a significant increase in the sleep problem score ... as was daytime use with violent content ... There was a trend toward greater impact of daytime violent use in the context of a bedroom television... and in low-income children...
Conclusions: Violent content and evening media use were associated with increased sleep problems. However, no such effects were observed with nonviolent daytime media use.
...The types of sleep problems reported by parents included trouble falling asleep, nightmares, waking during the night, trouble with morning alertness, and daytime sleepiness. The majority of violent media exposure in this study was from children's programming, rather than programming intended for adults or adolescents.
"Early childhood sleep disruption has been associated with obesity, behavior problems, and poor school performance," said Dr. Garrison, of Seattle Children's Research Institute. "We advise parents to choose non-violent media content, and to avoid media screentime entirely during the hour before bed. Removing televisions and other media devices from the child's bedroom can be an important first step. "
In the study, 28 percent of preschoolers who watched TV or played video games for at least 30 minutes after 7 p.m. had sleep problems most nights of the week, versus 19 percent of children whose TV and video-game use took place only before 7 p.m.
The link between violent entertainment and troubled sleep isn’t unexpected, says Carol Rosen, MD, medical director of the pediatric sleep center at Rainbow Babies & Children’s Hospital, in Cleveland. “The purpose of your dreams is to take your experiences of the day, reprocess them, look at them again, think about them, organize them,” Rosen says. “If your intake is very scary things, then you might not be surprised that fears develop and that you have night waking with difficulty falling asleep.” The study included 612 children ages 3 to 5. Garrison and her colleagues asked the parents to keep a detailed diary of their child’s media consumption over the course of one week, including the title, timing, and duration of each show or game. (To determine the level of violence, researchers consulted parental guidance ratings and actually analyzed specific shows and games.) On average, the kids spent 73 minutes per day in front of a TV or computer. The more time they spent watching TV or playing video games in the evening, the more likely they were to experience a sleep problem. And the same pattern held for violent shows and games.
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