The Sunday Times has an interesting article up:
NEW study claims to have found “strong support� for the theory that too much television for small children may trigger autism.
The study — which has sparked an angry debate in America, where it was carried out — found a correlation between the number of hours that children younger than three spend watching television and the rates of autism in a county-by-county analysis of four states.
The study provides the latest controversial theory to explain the estimated 10-fold rise in reported cases of autism over the past 30 years. There are now approximately 90,000 British children with autistic disorders.
However:
The American researchers — led by Michael Waldman, an economics professor at Cornell University — admit that their findings are not “definitive evidence� because they could find only indirect evidence of the amount of time that autistic children spend viewing television.
Nonetheless: interesting.
Whether or not autism is related to watching television, umh, quite a lot – personally I detest it when people watch several per hours TV. Using common sense, I cannot help but think that watching TV for hours a day makes one stupid. What those children who watch 4 hours per day TV should do, is borrow a book from the library and read. Probably a concept they (and their parents) don’t quite understand.
Reading stimulates the fantasy, both of adults and of children. One’s vocabulary (edit: ironically this word had to be corrected) expands. Reading enriches one’s life in a tremendous manner.
Parents who allow their children to watch several hours of television per day are doing their offspring a great disservice.
They are encouraging intellectual laziness.
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