HCHY List: item of general interest on media and children's health

[Mel Tremper]

This report does pull together a large number of studies and concludes
media consumption is linked to a range of problems among youth.  

 


Report Ties Children's Use of Media to Their Health 


 

The National Institutes of Health and a nonprofit advocacy group, Common
Sense Media, have another reason for President-elect Barack Obama to
keep urging parents to "turn off the TV."

In what researchers call the first report of its kind, a review of 173
studies about the effects of media consumption on children asserts that
a strong correlation exists between greater exposure and adverse health
outcomes.

"Coach potato does, unfortunately, sum it up pretty well," said Ezekiel
J. Emanuel, chairman of the bioethics department at the institutes'
clinical center, one of the study's five reviewers.

The report should compel lawmakers to underwrite media education efforts
and public service advertising campaigns and should motivate the
entertainment industry to be more "responsible and responsive," said Jim
Steyer, the chief executive of Common Sense Media, which helped to
finance the study.

"The research is clear that exposure to media has a variety of negative
health impacts on children and teens," he said.

Dr. Emanuel, Mr. Steyer and others plan to brief Washington policy
makers on the study on Tuesday. Joined by researchers at Yale University
and California Pacific Medical Center, Dr. Emanuel's team analyzed
almost 1,800 studies conducted since 1980 and identified 173 that met
the criteria the researchers set.

In a clear majority of those studies more time with television, films,
video games, magazines, music and the Internet was linked to rises in
childhood obesity, tobacco use and sexual behavior. A majority also
showed strong correlations - what the researchers deemed "statistically
significant associations" - with drug and alcohol use and low academic
achievement.

The evidence was somewhat less indicative of a relationship between
media exposure and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, the seventh
health outcome that was studied.

Dr. Emanuel, whose brother, Rahm, is the president-elect's chief of
staff, said he was surprised by how lopsided the findings were. "We
found very few studies that had any positive association" for children's
health, he said.

Researchers sought to look at the health effects of a wide array of
media and distill 30 years of research into a simple message. "The
average parent doesn't understand that if you plop your kids down in
front of the TV or the computer for five hours a day, it can change
their brain development, it can make them fat, and it can lead them to
get involved in risky sexual activity at a young age," Mr. Steyer said.

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.search-institute.org/pipermail/hchylist/attachments/20081211/22f2a1a4/attachment.htm