Food ads aimed at kids

The campaign to reduce ads for crap foods has had some effect. They see fewer ads for sweets and beverages but more for fast food. I guess you couldn't expect to see them replaced with ads for broccoli.

The long-term bad news is

An Institute of Medicine (IOM) report concluded that there was strong evidence that television advertising influences the short-term eating habits of children age 2 to 11, and moderate evidence that advertising influences their usual dietary intake, according to background information in the article.

Kids prefer what they've seen on TV, and they prefer what they're used to. Kids used to Tang don't like orange juice. I guess you just have to be vigilant. And you have to support things like nutrition requirements in Title 22 centers.

More bad things you can do to kids: nicotine, TV, and cortisol, oh, my!

This month's Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine (a JAMA journal) is devoted to early experience and it's effects later in life, all nicely summarized on Science Daily.

One study looked at prenatal maternal use of cocaine, an opiate, marijuana, alcohol, and nicotine and sleep problems in the kids. Of these, only nicotine caused sleep problems. It's not so much that other drugs are turning out to be less damaging to fetuses than we thought (although there is some of that) as that tobacco is turning out to be worse than we thought.

In another study, mothers with bad enough anxiety to make them be taking selective serotonin uptake inhibitors during pregnancy had 3 year olds with increased withdrawal, anxiety, and depression. Some of it is due to a gene variant.

In another study, too much TV at 29 months of age is associated with all sorts of bad stuff in fourth grade:

"Each additional hour (per day) of television in early childhood corresponded to a

• 7 percent unit decrease in classroom engagement, 
• 6 percent unit decrease in math achievement, 
• 10 percent unit increase in victimization by classmates, 
• 13 percent unit decrease in time spent doing weekend physical activity, 
• 9 percent unit decreases in activities involving physical effort, 
• 9 percent higher scores for consumption of soft drinks and 
• 10 percent higher scores for consumption of snacks, as well as a 
• 5 percent unit increase in BMI."

Another study compared kids who stayed with their parents after CPS became involved with kids who went into foster care. "Children who still lived with their parents had different patterns of cortisol production than those in foster care, with flatter slopes in waking to bedtime values," which has god knows what effects on an adult, but you can't imagine them to be good. On the other hand, it shows foster care works, in this respect.

Another study looked at twin pairs where one weighed 20% more than the other at birth. The bigger twin was more likely to have conduct problems at age 3 or 4. The association was stronger with dizygotic twins than between monozygotic twins. So which thing causes which? Or more likely, what initial condition cascades to produce both of them.

TV makes kids fat and dumb

This study says heavy exposure to TV at 2 years old has a raft of bad consequences at age 10:

• decrease in classroom engagement
• worse math scores
• increased victimization by other kids
• less physical activity
• more junk food
• fatter

The answer is for parents not to watch TV for hours at a time with their toddler in the room. I'm about as optimistic about that as I am about eliminating poverty.

Three family habits associated with less preschool obesity

A recent national study names three things parents can do to reduce the risk of their preschooler being fat:

• Eat together as a family.
• Make sure the kid gets enough sleep.
• Limit weekday TV time.

No revelations here, but it's quantified. In families who do all 3, 14% were fat, compared with 25% among those who did none of the above. So it changes from 1 kid in 7 to 1 kid in 4.

The author said,

"I imagine people are going to want to know which of the routines is most important: Is it limited TV, is it dinner, is it adequate sleep? And what this suggests is that you can't point to any one of these routines. Each one appears to be associated with a lower risk of obesity, and having more of these routines appears to lower the risk further."

 But you have to wonder which way the causal relation goes. Would a fat kid get less fat if you turned off the TV? It would not be a stretch to conjecture that people whose brains make them be more active than others would watch less TV and have different sleep patterns. I wonder what it would show if they compared kids who are sedentary but sit in their rooms and read or daydream instead of watch TV. I mean people who are sedentary have to do something. We had fat people before TV; they just did something else while they sat around. Here TV is a proxy for getting up and burning some calories.

That's not to say that watching a lot of TV isn't bad for preschoolers on other levels, but it may not be the proximate cause of preschool obesity.

Of course, I have to beat my hobbyhorse. A bug chunk of how fat you are is biologically determined, and I don't just mean your body translates dairy fat into human fat. Various hormones tell you when you are hungry and when you are not, and some people's hormones lie to them. Notice that even in families who did all three things "right," still 1 kid in 7 was fat.

How much does TV influence body image?

This is not what I thought science was. In a study published in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology and reported in Science Daily, the researchers asked kids 121 girls 3 to 6 years old how much they worried about being fat and other appearance-related questions. "Nearly half ...said they worry about being fat. About one-third would change a physical attribute, such as their weight or hair color."

Then they watched clips of either neutral TV (Dora the explorer or Clifford the big red dog) or beauty-centric parts of  Beauty and the Beast. Then they went into a room with lots of play stuff, and it turned out the girls who got the beauty message played with the appearance related stuff, such has hair brushing, the same amount of time as the girls who watched Clifford did.

The natural inference is that watching Beauty being told how beautiful she was didn't affect the kids all that much.  The primary author said,

While the study found no short-term consequences for young girls, the media's portrayal of beauty likely is one of the strongest influences on how they perceive their bodies because children spend so much time watching movies and television, Tantleff-Dunn said.

Now I can see saying this is contrary to all that published stuff, so we need to figure out why, but what they actually said was, "Our study said X is true, but we really know that it is not."

TV watching in licensed child care

In a phone survey of providers in Michigan, Washington, Florida and Massachusetts, 70% of home providers and 36% of centers admitted that kids in their care watch TV, DVDs or videos every day.

For preschoolers, the average time watched in centers was 24 minutes, and in the family homes it was 2.4 hours a day.

For toddlers it was 6 minutes a day in centers and 1.6 hours a day in family homes. Even infants get 12 minutes a day in family care.

And none of this counts passive viewing. Since I think most centers and certainly some family homes never use TV, some probably plop the kids in front of them all the time.

T'he American Academy of Pediatrics says no TV at all under 2 and 1 to 2 hours a day for older kids. This means that toddlers and preschoolers are average getting more than their entire daily dose in child care, and then they go home to another full overdose.

What I wonder is what the cumulative effect this will have not just on individual kids but on the culture. Since most of the youngest kids in child care are in family home care, if we subject a big proportion of our toddlers to an extra hour and a half a day of TV, will we, oh, I don't know, lower our collective IQ by a point?

At what point does TV watching (both what and how much) become a public health issue that we have to answer with regulation? My answer is never, or at least not in the visible future. We should educate people about the dangers of TV for little kids, but I'd not be in favor of regulating it in Title 22 child care. Title 5 is a different animal, and I see no problem regulating TV watching there.

Flash news: TV has commercials for junk food

I'm shocked to find that kid shows advertise stuff that's bad for kids. A study in the November/December issue of the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior says a lot of TV ads are for food, especially on Saturday and especially on kids' shows. What's more, the foods advertised had a lot of sugar or fat, and many were for fast food.

Your winnings, sir.

Oh, thank you.

More bad stuff about little kids watching TV: increased aggressiveness

A study published in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine and reported in on Science Daily says "Three-year-old children exposed to more TV, both directly and indirectly, are at increased risk for exhibiting aggressive behavior," and early childhood aggression "sometimes is predictive of more serious behavior problems to come, such as juvenile delinquency, adulthood violence and criminal behavior".

They say "neighborhood disorder" and a depressed mom or stressed parents are also factors, but just having it on while little kids were around was enough to make them more aggressive when those things were controlled for. The authors say "Further research is essential to determine whether pediatric recommendations concerning TV and children should include limits for general household TV use."

I don't think so. It's not right to say that watching Starsky and Hutch while your toddler is playing with blocks on the floor in front of the TV will cause her to join Hell's Grannies (video; transcript) when she's an old lady, but if I had a toddler again, I think I would have the TV on a lot less than I did when  I did.

Of course, since kids vary, and some are too shy, maybe watching a little football with dad will make men out of them. (I think of Beasley's dad giving him football pads for Christmas in Bloom County.)

Watching cop shows distorts our view of the world

People who watch a lot of cop or lawyer shows estimate the real world murder rate as being two and a half times higher than non-viewers estimate. Theu also overestimate the percent of the workforce who are cops and lawyers (it's actually about 1% each, but people who watch cop shows estimated 18% and 16%). They also misunderstand other things about the justice system.

Kids' screen time at 8 year high--Does it mean anything?

I always distrust hearing that some statistic is at an 8-year high, or sometimes I even  hear about a 3-year high. That short a highest since could as easily be a spot on a sine wave of natural variation. Global warming deniers like George Will point out that 2006 was the coldest year in a decade,but if you look at longer-term trends, it's obviously just a blip in an upward sweep.

So I wonder about this story in today's LA Times. It seems that kids 2 to 5 watch screens on video games, TV, DVDs (I don't know if they included phone screens) an average of 32 hours a week, and 6 to 11s watch more than 28 hours, and this is an 8-year high. This comes from a Nielsen survey (couldn't find a link to the actual report).

In general, we all do seem to be using more screen time. God knows I do. But if it's only an 8 year high, that's another way of saying use has been on average flat for the last 8 years. I'd much rather see a trend since, say, the beginning of widespread use of TV in the 1950s, or at least since personal computers became common in the early 1980s, so I know if it's really increasing at a shocking level lately.

I'd also want to plot it by age group. I'll bet 60 year olds spend more time looking at a screen than they did a few years ago, too, and 40 year olds, and so on.

Baby Einstein refunds

Disney is offering refunds to people who bought Baby Einstein videos since 2004. You can get $15.99 cash or exchanges for up to 4 returned DVDs. You don't have to have the receipt, just the DVD, and it's good until March 10, 2010.

The reason is the FTC (Federal Trade Commission, which polices false advertising claims) was on their butts about the whole point of their product, which was they claimed it made babies smarter, but it didn't, and in fact may contribute to attention problems later in childhood. They can still sell the stuff, but they have to tone down their claims about it being educational. They are still marketing as close to the FTC line as they can get away with.

Disney's PR flack said it was business as usual, their usual generous customer satisfaction guarantee (except that usually runs out after 60 days and requires a receipt).

The benefits of TV for preschoolers

An Australian researcher says that in some ways TV can be good for kids.

(M)uch other published research finds that selective television viewing for young children contributes to their cognitive and social development. ...Professor Seiter has looked at the way television can enhance a young child's social cache. She found that preschoolers often use their knowledge of popular programming to gain acceptance in the classroom. Television can provide a common symbolic experience for children, just as for adults.

How are you gonna talk with the kids around the water cooler if you don't know Barney?
Her analysis of criticism of Teletubbies. People who are against it haven't seen it or don't understand it.