Parent-Children Interactions Affected by Background TV

In a first of its kind study, experts at the University of Massachusetts looked at how interactions between parents and their children were influenced by a TV running in the background, even if the participants did not mind it directly. They found the correlation to be negative, both in terms of how much parents were involved in the dialog, as well as of how often the two (parent and child) spoke to each other. The finds are detailed in the September/October issue of the journal Child Development.

Some 50 children were analyzed during the experiments. All of the small ones were either one, two or three years old, and came to the researchers' lab accompanied by only one parent. They remained there for one one-hour session each. Half of that timer was spent in a playroom without a TV, whereas the other half in a room with a TV set, running shows such as Jeopardy! The scientists analyzed a number of factors related to the parent-child interactions, including their frequency, the number of questions and answers each of them asked the other one, as well as the number of responses each gave to the other's questions, e! Science News reports.

Following the observations, it was immediately clear to the team that both the quantity and the quality of the interactions between the parent and the child decreased considerably once they moved from the playroom to the TV room. Parents instantly became less active, attentive and responsive to their children, and spent, on average, 20 percent less time talking to their offspring, or answering their questions. “Although previous research found that background television disrupts young children's solitary play, this is the first study to demonstrate its impact on the quantity and quality of parent-child interactions,” the scientists write in the journal entry.

“Given that high-quality parent-child interaction plays an important role in children's development, the study challenges the common assumption that background TV doesn't affect very young children if they don't look at the screen. We need to pay greater attention to children's early, chronic exposure to TV,” they add. The research will hopefully provide the basis for a new set of guidelines related to keeping children safe from the notoriously harmful influence that TV sets have on them. In the US, statistics show that more than 30 percent of infants and toddlers live in houses where the TV is turned on most or all of the time.