QUESTION: Which one of these photos represents 120 calories?

ANSWER: All.

Do you feel the need to lose a little weight after the excesses of the holidays? Believe it or not, according to a new study, simply watching less TV could cause you to burn an average of 120 more calories per day!

That doesn’t sound huge, but according to the New York Times, that is the number of calories burned on a one mile walk.  It is also the number of calories in these servings of foods.

According to Dr. Jennifer Otten, lead author of the study:

“We need a longer-term study to see if this would be an intervention that would help with weight loss, or even weight gain prevention.  But if you add it up over time, it’s equivalent to walking eight miles a week.  Over a year, it might help prevent weight gain of 12 pounds.“

Why does unplugging have this effect? According to the study by Dr. Otten published in the December 14-28 of the Archives of Internal Medicine, adults who cut their TV viewing in half spent more time in light physical activities, or even couch-potato activities that burn more calories than TV-watching does (simple “unplugged” activities like reading, playing board games or scrapbooking!).  Their eating patterns did not change*.

The study was based on 36 overweight and obese adults who watched at least 3 hours of television per day.  20 of those people were asked to cut their viewing in half (enforced through a TV lock-out device).   Armband accelerometers measured the movements of all participants.

*NOTE:  An interesting inference from the NY Times Article is that children who cut back on TV actually DO EAT LESS TOO!  Would kids benefit even more than adults by cutting TV viewing in half??

Interesting links:

What Does 120 Calories Look Like? (Be sure to look at the 38 photos at the bottom of the page too)

What Does 200 Calories Look Like?

Click Off the TV, and Burn More Calories

THE STUDY: Effects of Television Viewing Reduction on Energy Intake and Expenditure in Overweight and Obese Adults – A Randomized Controlled Trial

Nielsen released a study last Monday (October 26) which found that children ages 2 to 5 watch more than 32 hours of TV per week. Kids ages 6 to 11 only watch about 28 hours per week (but they are in school more which accounts for the reduced TV watching).

When you consider that most adults work a 40 hour week, I find those numbers to be astonishing.  Apparently this is the most television viewing for 2 to 11 year-olds since 1995.

Also according to this study, kids aged 6 to 11 also watch more commercials than older kids or adults. Thanks to the wonders of DVR, they also watch the same programs over and over again.

What about video games?  The same study says that children ages 6 to 11 spend nearly 2.5 hours per week playing video games on a TV.

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SOURCES:

Nielsen Wire Blog: TV Viewing Among Kids at an Eight-Year High

MSNBC – Study: Many Tots Watch 32 Hours of TV a Week

So, here is my first TV-related post in a while for anyone interested in television and its effects on children.

Many thanks to my friend Wishy who is always way more up with current news than I am, and who kindly emails me links to any article she thinks might be of interest on my blog! I guess she is my Director of Current Affairs.

Here is Wishy’s latest find: Even Background TV May Delay Children’s Speech.  This article is nearly a month old, but that’s how long it took me to get around to writing my post.  Oh well.

According this MSNBC article, a new study* has found that for each hour of television exposure (even as background noise), infants heard 770 fewer words spoken to them by adults (a 7% decrease).  There was also a decrease in the number and length of children’s vocalizations, as well as child-adult conversation.

The possible explanation for this?  Here is the researchers’ conclusion:

“Some of these reductions are likely due to children being left alone in front of the television screen,” the researchers write in the June issue of the journal Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, “but others likely reflect situations in which adults, though present, are distracted by the screen and not interacting with their infant in a discernible manner.”

I would imagine that most mothers have been naturally chatting away with their pre-verbal babies since language first began.  But experts now realize that two-way linguistic interaction with adults is absolutely crucial for infant language development.

By the way, one startling fact from this article is that 30% of households have the TV on all the time.  Wow!

A final thought:  I wonder if too much talk radio would also have the same negative effect on language development.  I know when I am trying to listen to the news on NPR, I am not paying a whole lot of attention to what my children are saying either.

This is a good reminder for us all I think.

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* The study, entitled Audible Television and Decreased Adult Words, Infant Vocalizations, and Conversational Turns, appeared in the June 2009 issue of The Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine.  Here is a link to the abstract.  The full article is also available online with membership, or for a one-time access fee.

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(Photo credit: clarita from morguefile.com)

Hopefully NOT your tax dollars at work.

+++Exercise and limited TV time may keep kids trim +++

New Study – Boys need 13,000 steps per day, girls need 11,000.

Should we issue each child a pedometer? Or simply turn off the TV and send them outside? (Journal of Pediatrics – Text of actual study: Combined Influence of Physical Activity and Screen Time Recommendations on Childhood Overweight.)

+++Just having TV on can distract kids+++

Of course it does. Do these researchers even HAVE kids? (American Behavioral Scientist - Text of actual study: Television and Very Young Children)

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However, on a more serious note:

The USA Today TV distraction article says one survey found that 14% of parents say the TV is ALWAYS on in their homes. Also: “recent surveys show that as many as two-thirds of children up to 6 years old live in homes where the TV is on at least half the time, even if no one is watching.”

(Being a nerd, I really like to find the actual sources for what I quote when I put an article in my blog. Since newspapers don’t always give the source, I resort to Google. A quick Google tonight turned up no readily apparent studies for the TV always on or TV on half the time claims. If you know a link to these studies, please let me know via comment or email and I will update the post to include them.)

(Photo thanks to morguefile.com and photographer “cohdra” -Jane M. Sawyer.)

Something to think about:

In the United States -

• 19% of children aged 1 and under have a TV in their bedroom.
• 29% of children aged 2-3 have a TV in their bedroom.
• 43% of children aged 4-6 years have a TV in their bedroom.

And this:

“I watch CSI…[S]he sits down and watches with me. I don’t know how harmful it is to her. It’s something gory, but it doesn’t seem to bother her. She hasn’t had any nightmares from it.”

-Mother of a 1-3 year old, Irvine, California

Statistics and quote from a Kaiser Family Foundation study entitled: The Media Family: Electronic Media in the Lives of Infants, Toddlers, Preschoolers, and Their Parents

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My friend Wishy and I had a good laugh one day when we discovered that a classmate of our daughters was teaching the other children “bad words” by not actually saying the word itself, but by saying it backwards. Wishy’s daughter said to her in hushed tones: “Mom, did you know that “tish” spelled backwards is a bad word?” Further parental inquiry revealed that she knew that “cuff” spelled backwards was bad too.

A recent NPR piece entitled Why Kids Curse, brought this rather amusing memory back to me. Although we wish our children would never learn the “bad words,” it does inevitably happen. Unfortunately when it happens, is commonly sooner rather than later. Many parents seem to have a funny or embarrassing story of a precocious child and inappropriate language. Of course children might pick up bad language at home, but often it is from schoolmates or friends.

The NPR piece relates the funny tale of Yale psychologist Paul Bloom, whose 6 year-old announced one day the words that he had “learned” from overhearing the babysitter on the phone. He and his wife then decided to create an experiment in which they would invent some family swear words to see if their kids picked them up:

“So one of them was ‘flep,’” says Bloom. Whenever someone would bang their foot or hurt their toe, they’d scream “flep” as if it were an obscenity.

The experiment was very short-lived.

“It was a total failure,” says Bloom. “The children looked at us as if we were crazy.”

The reason for this failure? Kids are more influenced by their peers than their parents, according to Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker.

As I am interested in both parenting and linguistics, I found this story to be fascinating from both standpoints. There is more to the piece than what I mention here, so I encourage you to give it a read or a listen if you have a few minutes to spare.

And what on Earth does all this have to do with TV? Well, read on:

A study by the Parents Television Council found that about once an hour children watching popular children’s networks will hear mild curse words such as “stupid,” “loser” and “butt.” The scope and frequency can rise immeasurably with exposure to adult programs and popular music.

That’s the connection!

Link: Why Kids Curse – transcript and audio link (7:07)

(Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Since music was our Unplugged Project theme for last week, this seems to be a very appropriate time to talk about an interesting study that was just released by the Dana Foundation. The report shows a correlation between music training (any performance art training, in fact) and higher academic performance.

This has been demonstrated before, but the Dana study brought together cognitive scientists from seven US universities to try to figure out more precisely how and why this correlation exists. According to the Dana Foundation website, this study “…brings us closer to answering the question: Are smart people drawn to the arts or does arts training make people smarter?”

I don’t know how it was when you were in high school, but when I was there, those of us “nerds” in the band and orchestra did seem to be the kids who performed better in school than those who were not involved in music. I always assumed that most children who were in music perhaps had more involved parents, and that was the explanation. Or maybe “smarter” kids were somehow more drawn to music. But now it seems that there might actually also be some concrete scientific reasons for the “smart band kid” stereotype!

Here is a brief summation of the report’s findings (directly quoted from the website’s study summary page):

Here is a summary of what the group has learned:

1. An interest in a performing art leads to a high state of motivation that produces the sustained attention necessary to improve performance and the training of attention that leads to improvement in other domains of cognition.

2. Genetic studies have begun to yield candidate genes that may help explain individual differences in interest in the arts.

3. Specific links exist between high levels of music training and the ability to manipulate information in both working and long-term memory; these links extend beyond the domain of music training.

4. In children, there appear to be specific links between the practice of music and skills in geometrical representation, though not in other forms of numerical representation.

5. Correlations exist between music training and both reading acquisition and sequence learning. One of the central predictors of early literacy, phonological awareness, is correlated with both music training and the development of a specific brain pathway.

6. Training in acting appears to lead to memory improvement through the learning of general skills for manipulating semantic information.

7. Adult self-reported interest in aesthetics is related to a temperamental factor of openness, which in turn is influenced by dopamine-related genes.

8. Learning to dance by effective observation is closely related to learning by physical practice, both in the level of achievement and also the neural substrates that support the organization of complex actions. Effective observational learning may transfer to other cognitive skills.

The Foundation hopes to be able to continue and expand the study to really identify the precise biological brain mechanisms at work in the positive effects on the brain of artistic training.

Although I am opposed to the overscheduling of children that is so common these days, my one “mandatory” extra-curricular activity has always been learning a musical instrument. This study furthers my resolve to have my children learn an instrument. I feel that musical training has had an extremely positive effect on my life, and I want to pass that gift along to my children.

Furthermore, the fact that music and arts training seems to be so beneficial for overall brain development, makes it even more tragic that schools are cutting back on such programs.

Links:

+ About the study: Effects of Instrumental Music Training on Brain and Cognitive Development in Young Children: A Longitudinal Study

+ Summary of findings: Arts and Cognition: Findings Hint at Relationships (Summary)

+ Research Consortium Finds New Evidence Linking Arts and Learning, article by Brenda Patoine – A really interesting summary of the study and what it means!

+ MSNBC Video Report: Better Minds Through Music (Length 2:16) – This very brief news report only covers the work of one scientist involved in the study, Dr. Elizabeth Spelke of Harvard, who found a correlation between musical training and an enhanced abilities in geometric reasoning.

+ Follow-up comments from the public to the MSNBC report

+ Download the full PDF version of study here.

Tomorrow morning (February 28, 2008) on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, a story will air that is a natural extension of the NPR piece that I wrote about on February 21st in my post: Imaginative Play and Cognitive Function. According to the February 21st piece, children today no longer engage in imaginative, creative play. Unfortunately it turns out that imaginative play is essential for the formation of self-control and self-regulation. These are obviously very important skills in life and are a more accurate predictor of success in school than is IQ.

Tomorrow’s NPR story, Creative Play Makes for Kids in Control, describes a preschool program based on the work of Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, entitled “Tools of the Mind” (currently being implemented in Colorado, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, and Oregon). The program was developed by Dr. Elena Bodrova and Dr. Deborah Leong of the Metropolitan State College of Denver.

According to the description of the program on the Metropolitan State College of Denver website, Lev Vygotsky believed that

… until children learn to use mental tools, their learning is largely controlled by the environment: they attend only to the things that are the brightest or loudest and they can remember something only if has been repeated many times. AFTER children master mental tools, they can become in charge of their own learning by attending and remembering in an intentional and purposeful way. Similar to how using mental tools transforms children’s cognitive behaviors, they can also transform their physical, social and emotional behaviors. From being “slaves to the environment,” children become “masters of their own behavior.” As children are taught and practice an increasing number of various mental tools, they transform not only their external behaviors, but also their minds, leading to the emergence of higher mental functions.

Alix Spiegel’s NPR report describes a visit to the Geraldyn O. Foster Early Childhood Center in Bridgeton, N.J. where the Tools of the Mind program is being implemented for preschoolers. The point of the Tools of the Mind program is to intensively build “executive function” (ie. “self-regulation”) skills. Please read the NPR transcript for a detailed description of the activities observed at the center. It is quite interesting.

Adele Diamond, executive function researcher and professor of developmental cognitive neuroscience at the University of British Columbia, has observed and studied the Tools of the Mind program (she is in no way affiliated with the program). Here is her description of the first time she observed a Tools of the Mind class:

“I was totally blown away. The kids were sitting together working quietly. It was like a second-grade classroom instead of a preschool classroom. I couldn’t believe it.”

Ms. Diamond conducted a study following 147 preschoolers for two years. Half the children were in enrolled in a Tools of the Mind class, the other half were enrolled in a regular preschool curriculum. After two years, the children were all given an executive function assessment. The results? The regular school kids performed roughly “at chance” while the Tools kids did much better (about 85% correct).

Could reduced executive function skills be a contributing factor to the rising number of kids diagnosed with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder)? Ms. Diamond and a few other researchers think so. Professor Diamond says:

“I think a lot of kids get diagnosed with ADHD now, not all but many just because they never learned how to exercise self-control, self-regulation, the executive functions early.”

This is really fascinating to me, but sad. How could today’s children have lost all their natural and apparently important imaginative play behavior? Why do we have to have programs like Tools of the Mind to help these children self-regulate?

Is it because today’s kids spend much of their free time watching TV, playing video games and taking formal, adult-lead instruction for sports or other extra-curricular, “enrichment” activities? That’s what executive function researchers seem to think.

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Be sure to listen to the story tomorrow morning (February 28) on NPR’s Morning Edition, or check the transcript page for a link to the audio version.

Links:

Metropolitan State College of Denver

Tools of the Mind Program

Lev Vygotsky

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Photo courtesy of morguefile.com and photographer tangle_eye.

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On NPR’s Morning Edition this morning was a VERY interesting story (“Old-Fashioned Play Builds Serious Skills“) about how children’s play has changed in the last century. Instead of engaging in self-directed, imaginative, improvised play, play has become centered around toys and the latest movie or TV show: “Essentially, instead of playing pirate with a tree branch” they play “Star Wars with a toy light saber.”

Commercialization is only partly to blame, as child safety has become more of a concern in recent years. Parents are now more reluctant to let their children run loose around the neighborhood. They enroll kids in structured, adult-lead activities.

This change in play-habits has actually changed children’s brains according to researchers. Imaginative play helps kids develop what is known as “executive function,” which is a cognitive skill necessary for self-regulation (controlling emotions and behavior, resisting impulses, and exercising self-control and discipline).

Read this interesting excerpt from the NPR piece:

We know that children’s capacity for self-regulation has diminished. A recent study replicated a study of self-regulation first done in the late 1940s, in which psychological researchers asked kids ages 3, 5 and 7 to do a number of exercises. One of those exercises included standing perfectly still without moving. The 3-year-olds couldn’t stand still at all, the 5-year-olds could do it for about three minutes, and the 7-year-olds could stand pretty much as long as the researchers asked. In 2001, researchers repeated this experiment. But, psychologist Elena Bodrova at the National Institute for Early Education Research says, the results were very different.

“Today’s 5-year-olds were acting at the level of 3-year-olds 60 years ago, and today’s 7-year-olds were barely approaching the level of a 5-year-old 60 years ago,” Bodrova explains. “So the results were very sad.”

According to executive function researcher, Laura Berk: “Self-regulation predicts effective development in virtually every domain.” In fact, good executive function is a more reliable predictor of success in school than IQ. Poor executive function leads to high dropout rates, drug use, and crime. Of course there must be a middle ground here, but the better a child’s ability to self-regulate, the better they will perform in school, and in life.

So here is yet another reason to turn off the TV, ignore the terrible whines, agonizing howls of boredom and claims of inhumane parental treatment and see what happens. They just might surprise you with the games they come up with on their own. And…they will be improving their executive function skills!

I urge you to listen to this fascinating NPR piece (7 min 50 sec), or at least read the online transcript.

+ Some suggestions for activities that promote self-regulation:

(from researchers Deborah Leong, professor of psychology at Metropolitan State College of Denver, Elena Bodrova, senior researcher with Mid-Continent Research for Education and Learning, and Laura Berk, professor of psychology at Illinois State University, found on the transcript page of the NPR website):

- Play “Simon Says”

- Encourage “complex imaginative play” (child plans and acts out scenarios, invents own props, etc. Best if play lasts for several hours)

- Activities that require planning (the examples given are: games with directions, patterns for construction, recipes for cooking)

- Read storybooks with your children

- Encourage children to talk to themselves (“fosters concentration, effort, problem-solving, and task success”)

+ A related Unplug Your Kids post: Let Your Kids be Bored

(Photo (taken in Madagascar) courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and photographer Harald Kreutzer.)

Psychologist Dr. Aric Sigman, author of Remotely Controlled: How Television is Damaging Our Lives is waging a battle against so-called educational television for children, what he calls “recreational junk food.” According to Dr. Sigman, the brains of young children who are exposed to screen time (be it TV, computers or DVD/video) are physically developing in a less healthy way despite any actual learning that might occur as a result of this screen exposure.

He says: “There is a definite inverse relationship between time spent watching any kind of television or screen when you are young and your ability to read and concentrate when you are older.”

He believes that the sensory complexity of TV, video and computer games (rapidly changing images, colors, noises, etc.) is having a detrimental effect on the wiring of the child’s brain and is producing children with shorter attention spans. This claim is backed up by a study that I wrote about here: Children’s Behavioral Problems Linked to TV.

Dr. Sigman also says:

Studies of brain activity have shown that a child doing simple mental arithmetic with coloured counters or beans has greater blood flow to the brain than one engaged what may look like a far more complex computer game… It may well be that your child learns from the TV that a certain country is in Africa, but that may well also come at the cost of doing something to their attention span…(w)hereas if a parent is talking to their children about geography or nature, they can learn without that risk and will physically exercise their brains in the process.

Do Dr. Sigman’s kids watch TV? “My children have candy sometimes, and television is just like candy, it’s recreational junk food…(b)ut it’s a complete myth that children somehow inherently need TV — otherwise they would be born with a television built into their stomachs, just like the Tellytubbies”.

Yet again, the old adage “all things in moderation” seems to be good advice!