Finetuning the debate: educational vs. violent content for toddlers and preschoolers

Children imitate. When they see movements or actions performed by others, they want to try them for themselves. So you would think it would follow that the behaviors they see on screen can make a big difference in how they behave. But for many years the debates about TV viewing and young children have focused on the time spent watching, regardless of what is actually shown on the screen. The discussions have missed a crucial point.

New work by Dimitri Christakis and Frederick Zimmerman published on Monday, in Pediatrics, can go some way in fine-tuning the debate. The researchers, who wrote The Elephant in the Living Room, are becoming well-known for their analyses of surveys on children's time with media. In these most recent studies, they took a look at time diaries that families started in the late 1990s. Then they compared three types of media use by young children -- educational content, non-educational but non-violent content and violent content.

Their results showed that viewing violent content at preschool ages was associated with later anti-social behaviors in boys. They also found that a link to attention problems turned up with the viewing of non-educational and violent content before age 3, but not at age 4 and 5.

What's more, they revealed that watching educational content before 3 had no connection with attention problems in later childhood. That's an important update to their research, given that in 2004 they published a report showing a link between attention problems and TV time at that young age that lumped all TV time together, regardless of content.

As always, remember that these are associations, not proof that TV viewing is causing the result. Many researchers are aching to design controlled experiments that can start to test the question of what is causing what. Those kinds of studies are expensive, but perhaps there's some hope that we'll see them in the near future.