Too Many Babies Watching Too Much TV

Niamh Baldock / Alamy--from Time Magazine, 8/6/07

This week Nielsen came out with its latest quarterly analysis from something known as the  “Anytime Anywhere Media Measurement” initiative, or A2/M2. The initiative aims to “accurately measure viewing on television and the Internet, with plans for measurement of mobile media via panels, plus additional delivery platforms as further technology is developed and adopted by consumers.” In English. that means  that Nielsen is measuring the audience for television, computer and mobile phones. The latest numbers show that Americans have taken the term “couch potato” to new heights (or lows, depending on how you view all this screen time). An analysis of the year-over-year data shows

“considerable year-over-year growth in terms of time spent for DVR (up 21.1%) and online video (up 34.9%) in Q3 2009. Given the consistent spike in usage among the three screens of television, Internet and mobile, consumers are clearly adding video platforms to their schedule, rather than replacing them.”

Here’s what Nic Covey, Nielsen’s director of what the company terms “cross-platform insights” says about the findings:

“Americans today have an insatiable appetite for not only content, but also choice. Across all age groups, we see consumers adding the Internet and mobile devices to their media diet — consuming media anytime and anywhere possible.”

The majority of Americans still watch television, of course, and lots of it. Some of Nielsen’s results:

• In 3Q09, the average American watched 31 hours of TV per week, with 31 minutes spent in playback mode with their DVR.

• In addition, each week the average consumer spent 4 hours on the Internet and 22 minutes watching online video.

• The average consumer spent 3 minutes watching mobile video each week.

That’s a lot of screen time. Yet I found other data from Nielsen, released in October, more troubling.  It showed that kids ages 2-5 now spend more than 32 hours a week on average in front of a TV screen. Those 6-11 spend slightly less time, about 28 hours per week, watching TV, presumably because they are in school for part of the day. Young kids also watch a lot of commercials in playback mode. Older kids spend, on average, 2 hours 23 minutes a week playing video games, compared to 1 hour 12 minutes for those 2-5. Nearly half of kids aged 6-11 spent time on the Internet.

I’m not sure if this is positive or negative, but it certainly means kids aren’t doing as much stuff outdoors–playing sports, riding bikes, exploring their backyard–or just lying around on the floor, listening to music and daydreaming. For very young children, the price they pay for all this television time is delayed language development.  A 2007 study by researchers at the University of Washington found that babies who watched videos learned fewer vocabulary words than infants who never watched the videos.  Those studies were led by led by Frederick Zimmerman and Dr. Dimitri Christakis, both at the University of Washington. Christakis and his colleagues found that by three months, 40% of babies are regular viewers of DVDs, videos or television; by the time they are two years old, almost 90% are spending two to three hours each day in front of a screen. Three studies have shown that watching television, even if it includes educational programming such as Sesame Street, delays language development.

Maybe watching television, online videos, commercial replays and videos on the mobile device is the  necessary preparation for a future in which our  children will inevitably be consuming media in all its myriad forms, anytime and anywhere, but childhood is still… well… childhood.  To preserve a little of that, perhaps we need to take their phones away for a while and turn off the TV.