Kids' TV time linked to school woes, bad habits

(News Terupdate) - Young children who watch a lot of TV aren't just missing out on more stimulating activities. They may also be destined for problems at school and unhealthier habits later in life, new research suggests.

Each additional hour of TV that toddlers watch per week translates into poorer classroom behavior, lower math scores, less physical activity, and more snacking at age 10, according to a new study in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.

"Kids should be doing things that are intellectually enriching: playing with board games, playing with dice, playing with things that will improve their motor skills, reading," says the lead author of the study, Linda Pagani, Ph.D., a professor in the School of Psychoeducation at the University of Montreal, in Quebec. "All that is replaced by sitting on the couch."

Pagani and her colleagues followed more than 1,300 children for over seven years. Using parent surveys, the researchers measured the amount of TV the kids watched at age two-and-a-half, and again at age four-and-a-half.

Then, when the children were in fourth grade, the researchers asked the kids' schoolteachers to rate their academic performance, how well they got along with peers, and how well they listened and followed instructions. They also asked parents about the child's diet and level of physical activity.

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Each additional hour spent in front of the TV per week at age two-and-a-half corresponded to a 7 percent decrease in classroom engagement, a 6 percent decrease in overall math achievement, and a 10 percent increase in being bullied by peers. (Interestingly, TV time was not associated with reading skills.)

These findings suggest that kids who watch too much TV are "learning to be just a passive receptacle," Pagani says.

TV watching also appeared to have negative effects on physical health, with each additional weekly hour resulting in a 9 percent decline in overall physical activity, a 9 percent increase in soft-drink consumption, a 10 percent increase in snacks eaten, and a 5 percent increase in body mass index.

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The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children under the age of 2 watch no television at all, and after age 2 watch no more than one to two hours of quality programming a day. But nearly half of 1- to 2-year-olds and more than 40 percent of 2- to 3-year-olds are estimated to watch more than the recommended amount, the study notes.

How does TV harm kids?

Pagani's study is merely the latest to call attention to the drawbacks of childhood TV-watching. A number of studies have linked too much TV to a range of negative effects in kids, including shorter attention spans, slower language acquisition, increased aggression, and weight gain.

Experts have suggested several possible explanations for these findings. One theory is that time spent in front of the tube is time that could be spent on more enriching activities. As Dr. Jeffrey Brosco, M.D., a professor of clinical pediatrics at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, puts it, "Every hour that you're watching TV, you're not talking to someone, not playing a game, not building something with your blocks."

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Another theory is that the act of watching television can harm developing brains. A child's brain triples in size within the first three years of life in response to external stimulation, says Dr. Dimitri Christakis, M.D., a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington and the country's foremost expert on the health effects of TV in childhood.

"Early exposure to [television] can actually be over-stimulating for the developing brain, and that can lead to shorter attention spans [and] cognitive difficulties," says Christakis, the author of "The Elephant in the Living Room: Make Television Work for Your Kids."

The rapid edits and quick sequences found in many of today's TV shows may be especially harmful in this respect, Christakis adds. "The hypothesis we have is that this conditions the mind to expect high levels of input, and by comparison, reality is boring -- it doesn't happen fast enough," he says.

Yet another possibility is that the negative effects of TV that have been reported in studies are in fact a symptom of broader family and household dynamics. In the new study, for instance, the children whose mothers were less educated and children from single-parent families tended to watch more television. Although Pagani and her colleagues controlled for these and other factors in their analysis, household habits can shape studies like this in ways that can be difficult to tease out.

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"It's always possible that what you're measuring is not TV itself, but families that are more likely to let their kids watch TV versus families that don't want them to watch TV, or maternal education," says Brosco. "No one really understands what the effects of TV truly are, but so many studies--like this [one]--suggest TV is just plain bad for you."

Some TV shows are better than others

Watching television isn't necessarily harmful, however, and it doesn't have to be a mindless activity, says Christakis. He points out that Pagani and her colleagues did not ask about the specific programming that kids watched, which may weaken the findings.

"The results of this study probably in some ways misrepresent the reality," Christakis says. "Studies that we've done find that what kids watch--and how they watch--is as important as how much they watch."

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Christakis believes that children should watch no more than an hour of television a day at any age. But, he says, parents should distinguish between mind-numbing cartoons and educational programs such as Sesame Street. "Parents need to know that the best-quality shows have a curriculum," he says. "They're trying to teach your child something, anything from the letter k to skills like how to share or how to handle a conflict."

According to Christakis, the best way for young children to watch TV is with a parent. This allows parents to use potentially negative content (such as violence or advertising) as a learning experience, and also provides an opportunity to engage with the children and reinforce the message of educational shows.

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Obese kids more vulnerable to bullies

(News Terupdate) - Children in Grades 3 through 6 who are obese are more likely to be bullied than their normal-weight peers, a new study has found.

No one who has attended grade school -- or who has even the slightest familiarity with children -- will be surprised by these findings. What is surprising, however, is that obese children are bullied more often even if they possess qualities that can discourage bullies, such as having good social skills or doing well in school.

"When we started this study, I really suspected that we might find that the obesity or overweight might not be the driving force," says the lead author of the study, Julie Lumeng, M.D., a professor of pediatrics at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor. "What we found is that it didn't matter. No matter how good your social skills, if you were overweight or obese you were more likely to be bullied."

In the study, which appears this week in the journal Pediatrics, Lumeng and her colleagues followed more than 800 children -- all born in 1991 -- from 10 cities across the U.S. When the children were in the third, fifth, and sixth grades, the researchers surveyed teachers, mothers, and the children themselves about whether they were bullied, and also surveyed the adults about the children's social skills. They then compared these responses with the children's body mass index, a simple ratio of height and weight.

Overall, kids who were obese were 65 percent more likely to be bullied than their peers of normal weight; overweight kids were 13 percent more likely to be bullied, although that finding was not statistically significant, the study notes. This pattern persisted even when the researchers took into account other factors that are associated with both obesity and being bullied, such as coming from a low-income family or doing poorly in school.

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Still, the findings don't rule out the possibility that being overweight and being bullied share a common, underlying cause, says Matthew N. Davis, M.D., a primary care physician and the director of the C.S. Mott Children's Hospital National Poll on Children's Health.

"There's always been the question in the back of people's minds about whether there was another factor involved which was related to both bullying and obesity," says Davis, who was not involved in Lumeng's study.

Sylvia Rimm, Ph.D., a clinical professor at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, in Cleveland, Ohio, suggests that the low self-esteem of overweight children may make them targets for their peers.

Rimm, who wasn't involved in the study, surveyed thousands of middle-school children for a 2004 book, "Rescuing the Emotional Lives of Overweight Kids." "Kids who considered themselves very overweight not only were bullied, but...indicated more loneliness, saw themselves as troublemakers, and saw themselves as sad, fearful, and wimpy," she says. "They really have huge struggles."

One reason that children might be more apt to pick on their overweight classmates is that they are taking after adults, says Davis.

"Children pick up behaviors from adults, so we always have to keep in mind how we're modeling respect for others around multiple issues, including weight," he says. "Imagine how many signals kids get about weight just by hearing conversations by adults or seeing advertisements on TV. The messages are everywhere in terms of trying to control weight and be a different size than you are right now."

Wendy Craig, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, says that bullying and obesity are both major public health concerns that teachers and schools -- and not just parents -- need to address.

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Teachers "are like social architects," says Craig, who has studied bullying for more than a decade but wasn't involved in the current study. "They set the tone for what's acceptable. Teachers reinforce these messages every day in their classroom when they interact with kids."

In fact, positive interactions with parents may help prevent bullying in the first place, according to another new study, presented today at the annual meeting of the Pediatric Academic Societies in Vancouver, B.C.

In that study, researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center analyzed data from the 2007 National Survey of Children's Health, which included more than 45,000 parents of children between the ages of 10 and 17.

Children whose parents shared ideas and talked often with them were about 40 percent less likely to bully other children compared to the children of parents who said they didn't do those things regularly. On the other hand, the children of parents who said they are often angry with them or who feel bothered by them were up to three times more likely to be bullies, according to the study.

Interestingly, previous studies have suggested that obese children are more likely to bully others, in addition to being the victims of bullying. One possible explanation for this, Lumeng says, is that children who have difficulty staying calm and controlling their impulses to lash out at others may also have a hard time regulating their eating, and may eat for emotional reasons rather than out of hunger.

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Overweight children are caught in a vicious circle of self-destructive behavior, Rimm says. "They're inactive, and they're sad kids, and they use eating as gratification," she says. "Of course, the effect is that continued eating is almost their only source of satisfaction, and so it's a terrible cycle."

Protecting overweight kids -- socially and physically --requires helping them break this cycle, Rimm adds.

"A key thing is to discover their strengths and get them involved and active in extracurricular activities," she says. "If they concentrate only on their weight, they're not going to build confidence."

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Children's cold, allergy medicine recalled

(News Terupdate) - A voluntary recall has been issued for more than 40 over-the-counter drugs for children, including Tylenol and Motrin, because they don't meet quality standards.

"This recall is not being undertaken on the basis of adverse medical events," McNeil Consumer Healthcare said in a statement Friday. "However, as a precautionary measure, parents and caregivers should not administer these products to their children."

FDA commissioner Margaret Hamburg gave a similar recommendation in a statement Saturday, saying, "we want to be certain that consumers discontinue using these products," though she called the chance for serious health problems "remote."

"Some products in the recall may have a higher concentration of active ingredient than specified while others may have inactive ingredients that don't meet testing requirements, the company said.

The company said it issued the recall after consulting with the Food and Drug Administration. The affected brands include: Tylenol Infants' Drops, Children's Tylenol Suspensions, Children's Tylenol Plus Suspensions, Motrin Infant Drops, Children's Motrin Suspensions, Children's Zyrtec Liquids in Bottles and Children's Benadryl Allergy Liquids in Bottles.

The drugs were made in the United States and distributed to Canada, the Dominican Republic, Dubai, Fiji, Guam, Guatemala, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Panama, Trinidad & Tobago and Kuwait.

"There are a number of other products on the market, including generic versions of the recalled products, which are intended for use in infants and children and are not affected by the recall," the FDA said Saturday in issuing guidance to parents.

More details are available by calling 1-888-222-6036 or visiting McNeil's website.

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Jesse James spotted without ring

(News Terupdate) - After a month at a treatment facility to deal with "personal issues," Jesse James was spotted back at his Los Angeles area home Monday. He was not wearing a wedding ring as he took his children to school.

James, 40, checked into the treatment center last month after his marriage to Oscar-winner Sandra Bullock went into a crisis amid reports that he had multiple affairs.

Bullock, 45, had remained out of sight until earlier this month when she was photographed hiking in Northern California, also not wearing her wedding ring.

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Let teens drink? Parents wrestle with the question

(News Terupdate) - Martha was tough on her children when it came to alcohol in their early teens.

When she saw beer at a party her then-14-year-old daughter was attending, she broke it up and told all the kids to call their parents. When her son was about the same age, she grounded him for a month after learning he had a drinking episode.

But her outright prohibition softened when her children reached their late teens. She lives in Georgia, a state that allows parents to let their underage children -- but no one else's -- have alcohol in their own homes. She lets her now-18-year-old son have a beer or a little wine at home, in part to kill curiosity, but won't serve his friends.

Suspecting alcohol will be part of his senior prom experience, she's having him take a limo. While planning to escort him and his friends to a rented beach house for spring break this year, she expected to have a "don't ask, don't tell" policy, but she wouldn't furnish alcohol, and she'd take away their car keys.

It's probably unrealistic, she says, for parents to forbid alcohol to older teens outright. Instead, she teaches moderation, safety and responsibility.

"If you can be around your child and monitor them all the time and watch everything they do, and if it works for you and them, then [prohibit it]," said Martha, an Atlanta-area resident who spoke on condition that her last name be withheld. "But I think, given what's out there, you have to teach them how to be safe and considerate of others."

U.S. law requires states, as a condition of getting highway funds, to prohibit people under 21 from buying or publicly possessing alcohol. Some states have situational exceptions, but no state allows people to furnish alcohol to an underage person who isn't their child, ward or spouse, said Mike Hilton, deputy director of the division of epidemiology and prevention research at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

States' underage drinking laws

Yet minors find a way get alcohol elsewhere.

About 10.1 million people ages 12 to 20 in the United States -- more than a quarter of that age group -- drank at least once in a certain month's period in 2008, according to that year's National Survey on Drug Use and Health.

More than 30 percent of underage drinkers said they paid for their most recent drink; for those who didn't pay, the most common source was 21 or older and not a relative, according to the survey for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

With matters of health, safety, morality and legality to consider, what goes through parents' minds when they determine what stance to take with their children on alcohol?

Debbie Taylor says she told her son, Casey, that she didn't want him to drink while underage, but if he ever did, he was not to drive.

She wishes her message had been different.

Casey Taylor, of Casper, Wyoming, was 18 when he died of alcohol poisoning in July 2002. Just two months out of high school and one month into living away from home with a roommate, he had succumbed to a challenge from friends to chug a large amount of rum, his mother said.

His blood-alcohol content, she said, was 0.41 percent.

Debbie Taylor said she'd never caught her son -- an honor roll student and varsity football player and wrestler -- drinking, but she twice found rum bottles hidden in her garage when he was 17 and suspected they were his. The first one she threw away. The second, she left.

"My reasoning for leaving the second bottle there was that all of the kids are doing it, and I did it growing up," Taylor, 52, said.

"If I could go back, I would make it absolutely clear that I didn't want him drinking at all -- that he was underage, that it is not legal," she added. "That's what I did with his younger brother [then 16] after Casey died. It was made perfectly clear to him that I didn't want him drinking at all until he was 21. And he didn't."

Taylor joined Mothers Against Drunk Driving in 2003 and is now the Wyoming chapter's spokeswoman. She said she now believes teens aren't ready to drink.

MADD supports the minimum drinking age of 21 years, citing numerous studies showing that it has reduced alcohol-related fatalities and injuries since it was federally mandated in the 1980s, and arguing that drinking can be harmful to teens' still-developing brains.

Laura Dean-Mooney, MADD's national president, said parents can prevent underage drinking by discussing rules and consequences often and early -- starting around fourth grade, when peer pressure starts to kick in. She said parents can find tips on how to encourage alcohol abstinence and set rules and consequences on the MADD-operated website ThePowerOfParents.org.

"The tricky thing with letting kids in their late teens drink is that you're not always going to be home every time they choose to drink. You're not always going to be there to take away the keys," she said when asked whether she could understand parents who argue that absolute prohibition isn't the way to go.

Sheri Reed, an editor with The Stir, a blog run by CafeMom about issues for mothers, says her readers give her a full range of reactions and perspectives when it comes to teens and alcohol.

Reed says the topic is important for her, in part because she's a mother of boys ages 7 and 3, and because she's a recovering alcoholic who started drinking in the eighth grade and has been sober for nine years.

The California resident has written that she has no intention of introducing alcohol to her children when they're teens. She does intend to talk to her kids about her experiences and let them know that alcohol isn't necessary for a fulfilled life.

She doesn't know yet what her exact plan will be beyond lots of talks. But she says she doesn't expect that she and her husband will be able to stop their children from trying alcohol before they're 21.

"I don't think that's a reality in this world," Reed, 39, said. "It's my hope that they just won't be insane."

As for Martha of Georgia, she says she generally discourages her 18-year-old from drinking and reminds him it's against the law outside her supervision at home. Putting him in school activities and encouraging him to study hard -- she says he's a straight-A student -- helps keep him out of trouble.

"He has a good grounding in what's healthy and what's not. That's what I taught my children -- how to live with balance," she said. "I've seen people go extreme in either direction [with alcohol], and I don't think either one is totally healthy."

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