Television is part of the daily lives of many young families and a new study shows that watching TV in the evening and violent shows in the daytime can disrupt sleep of preschoolers.
Overall, preschool-age children watched, on average, 1 hour and 12 minutes of television a day, according to the study published in Pediatrics today. Each additional hour of TV watching in the evening was associated with a noticeable jump in sleep problems, researchers found. Watching violent shows during the day also was associated with increases in sleep problems.
Perhaps even more surprising, other research and studies found between 20 percent and 43 percent of preschoolers have TV sets in their bedrooms, the article reported. This new study found parents whose children have a TV in their room were more likely to report their child was tired during the day.
We live in a digital age, when screen time, not just on television, but on cell phones, laptops, tablets and cars, is spreading into more aspects of the lives of our children and families. Increasingly, parents have to manage the growing number of mediums where their children can watch the tube. This research not only highlights the impact of evening and violent television on preschoolers' sleep, it makes it clear we need more research.
Future research in this area should examine whether changes in child media use can significantly improve a child's sleep over time, as well as the degree to which inadequate sleep mediates the previously reported relationship between high levels of media use and subsequent child behavior and learning problems. - Pediatrics.
Paul Nyhan
I am a dad who made his living for 21 years as a working journalist, with long stints at Bloomberg News, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper (RIP) and Congressional Quarterly .
So far, I have split my career between the two Washingtons, spending half in the nation's capitol and the other 10 years in Seattle. During those years I covered a lot of territory, reporting on Congress, the Federal Reserve, lobbying, public housing policies and even those derivatives now wreaking havoc with our economy. In Seattle, I wrote about the economy, aerospace, organized labor, disability, taxes, working poverty, family news and the broken economics of child care.
My most satisfying beat, though, was my last as a family reporter, since it allowed me to work on my most important job - parent of a five-month-old baby, a daughter in preschool and a son in kindergarten - while still working as a journalist. My newspaper is now closed, but I am still on the beat. Since 2009, I have been writing about early learning for Thrive by Five Washington and covering family trends and news for various publications.