Most of you know how I feel about media and kids: it has little, if any, value in their lives. Kids watch too much TV, play too many video games and fill their tender minds with violent, sexual and harmful music simply because someone wants to make a buck off of them.
Most of you know how I feel about media and kids: it has little, if any, value in their lives. Kids watch too much TV, play too many video games and fill their tender minds with violent, sexual and harmful music simply because someone wants to make a buck off of them.
I have to speak up about the study recently released on SpongeBob SquarePants’ effect on our kids.
This study looked at how well children focus on a task after watching clips of SpongeBob and compared their performance with that of kids who watched a calmer show presented by PBS. The researcher found that the children who completed the task after watching clips of SpongeBob had a more difficult time concentrating than the children who watched the slower moving PBS show. The conclusion? Watching SpongeBob aggravates ADHD.
I have long argued that television and video games have harmed our children’s ability to focus. Every other boy I see with ADHD seemingly visits my office while staring into the screen of a hand held video game. He plays the entire time his mother and I chat about his inability to focus (and his poor grades.) I have felt for years that playing video games and watching television shows with fast paced auditory stimuli and visual imagery dramatically harms a child’s ability to focus on black words on a white piece of paper.
