Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Ban under-2s from watching TV?

Children should be banned from watching television until they are 2 years old because it can stunt their language development and shorten their attention span, according to new Australian recommendations. The guidelines warn of the damage done by sitting inactive for hours and advise that reading, drawing or solving puzzles should also be kept to a minimum.
The Food & Health Skeptic comments:

Note that no evidence of the supposed ill-effects of TV watching by toddlers is quoted. It is just opinion from intrusive busybodies. It should not be particularly hard to do a double-blind study of the matter but they will avoid that like the plague. Double blind studies have a nasty habit of upsetting popular notions. If there were any truth in the assertions below, my son should be a gibbering idiot -- as he has spent most of his life in front of some screen or other, a TV screen or a computer monitor. He is in fact socially popular, in good health, has a much broader knowledge of the world than most and also has a first class honours degree in mathematics. But he IS the son of an academic. It's genetics that explains what he is, not some tripe about TV watching.

Posted via email from Garth's posterous

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

So what in the bloody hell are they supposed to DO?

Seems almost like we're heading back to the days of the pre-war British public schools, where sports were everything and made you manly while bookwork turned you into some sort of pusillanimous sissy. Except even the intellectually dullest Public School boy would never have bought the sort of mendacious tripe this government's shoving at us. As for pusillanimous sissy bookworms, tell that to the fairly large number of Germans that Siegfried Sassoon put in the ground on his way to being one of the greatest war poets in history.

October 15, 2009 at 3:54 AM

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