Parents sound off on whether TV belongs in a child's bedroom

According to 2005 data from the Kaiser Family Foundation, 43 percent of children ages 4 to 6 have a television in their bedroom. The numbers are lower for younger children, but still suprisingly high and disturbing to many experts in child development, who note that several studies show correlations between bedroom TVs and lower achievement at school. (I don't have easy access to data for bedroom TVs with older children but will look it up. Stay tuned.)

Last week, BabyCenter.com opened an unscientific poll asking, "Does your child have a TV in his or her room?" When I checked the results this morning, about one-quarter of parents had responded that, yes, there is a TV in their child's bedroom. Does it belong there? That question has prompted hundreds of parents to chime in on the BabyCenter.com bulletin boards. Opinions run strong against the idea and many parents say that "no TV in the bedroom" is one rule they will stick by even as their children get older. But some parents say the context of their household (not to mention the layout of the house itself) plays a role. One mother wrote that her daughter has a TV with a DVD player in her room, but that the TV isn't hooked up for service. "She can only watch DVDs on it," she wrote. "On Sunday, she has movie time while I get the house cleaned."

See the Kaiser Family Foundation's 2006 report, "The Media Family," for several tidbits of interesting data and in-depth discussion of the topic. One surprise from their research, which I wrote about in my book, is that parents were putting the TVs in the bedrooms not because they didn't know what to do with extra TVs (which was expected to be the answer) but because they wanted to be able to use the TV in the family room for their own shows.