Should Your Teen Have a TV in the Bedroom?
While teens enjoy the last offical day of spring break, cleaning and reorganizing is on the to-do list for many families. One thing you might want to reevaluate is whether your teen should have a television in their room or not. According to parenting experts, you might want to keep it out! Here’s more from OHealthy’s article on the topic:
Although your teenager may poignantly plead that he or she is the only child left in America without a bedroom television, health experts recommend that parents stand their ground and keep TV out of the bedroom.
There seems to be a good reason for this. The latest research, published in the April issue of the journal Pediatrics, shows that having a bedroom television not only leads to more TV viewing, but also results in less time spent with the family, less time exercising, lower fruit and vegetable intake, more sweetened beverage consumption, and in lower grades.
“The big take-home message from our study is that TVs should be removed from kids’ bedrooms, and it could have a positive effect on kids’ health,” said the study’s lead author, Daheia Barr-Anderson, a postdoctoral fellow at the Adolescent Health Protection Research Training Program at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health in Minneapolis.
Health professionals have been warning for years about too much television watching among young people, and especially about making the TV set so easily accessible. But past research suggests that many parents aren’t heeding that advice. About 68 percent of American youngsters have televisions in their bedrooms, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.
One large study found that children between ages 8 and 18 spend more than three hours every day watching television. Numerous studies have been done to assess TV’s effect on young children, but research on bedroom TVs and older adolescents is scarce, according to the current study.
Barr-Anderson and her colleagues gathered information on the presence of a bedroom TV and socio-demographic, behavioral and personal characteristics through a questionnaire mailed to 781 teens who were an average age of 17.2 years.
The results mirrored past studies. Almost two-thirds of this group had a TV in their bedroom. Having a personal TV doubled the risk that a teen would regularly watch more than five hours of TV daily, compared to teens without a television in the bedroom.
Click here to read the full article.
Does your teen have a TV in his or her room? Why or why not?
I’ve been looking around for the evidence linking too much TV watching to lower grades in school.
Then I found your post.
When our daughter was in third grade, we disconnected the TV during the school week and only watched about two hours as a family during the weekend so we controlled what was seen.
To fill her time after doing homework, our daughter had to read and she did.
It paid off. Our daughter is graduating from high school this year and has already been accepted to Stanford along with acceptances from UCLA and UC San Diego and UC Davis. Her GPA is 4.66 (including honors and AP classes).
Saying no and turning off the TV is part of a parent’s job. In a future post on my blog at iLook China.net, I’ll be linking to this post.
Thank you. More parents “NEED” to hear this message.
Thank you Lloyd for your insightful comment.
Your daughter has obviously created a highly succesful academic career based on thoughtful TV viewing.
I agree with you that turning of the TV is a parent’s job and it’s important that they are willing to be seen as “the bad guy” in the short run. When my dad said the same to me, I thought he was the worst father ever! Now, I am most grateful!
Thanks for taking the time to comment!
[...] The latest research, published in the April issue of the journal Pediatrics, shows that having a bedroom television not only leads to more TV viewing, but also results in less time spent with the family, less time exercising, lower fruit and vegetable intake, more sweetened beverage consumption, and in lower grades. Source: Onslow/Allison [...]