Too Much TV Can Make Child Violent or Fat, Doctors Warn

Too many hours of television viewing is one cause of violent or aggressive behavior in children and contributes substantially to childhood obesity, the American Academy of Pediatrics said Monday.

In its first policy statement on children and television since 1984, the 39,000-member academy called for parents and pediatricians to restrict children’s viewing, urging that time spent in front of the tube be cut in half.

By the time a child of today is age 70, he or she will have spent about seven years just watching television, the pediatricians said.

“For some children, the world shown on television becomes the real world,” the statement said.

The academy also recommended:

--Intensifying efforts to teach parents and pediatricians about television’s influence and promoting critical viewing among children.

--Limiting children’s viewing to one to two hours daily and promoting activities such as reading, athletics and hobbies.

--Supporting legislation to make the broadcasting of high-quality children’s programs a condition of station license renewal and to require at least one hour a day of educational children’s programming.

--Supporting efforts to ban programs on which toys are the main characters.

--Portraying sexuality responsibly.

--Working to eliminate alcohol ads on television and encouraging extensive advertising against drinking.

A. C. Nielsen Co. data indicate that children ages 2 to 5 watch TV about 25 hours weekly; 6- to 11-year-olds, more than 22 hours weekly; and 12-to 17-year-olds, 23 hours a week, the policy statement noted.

Behavior experts have established a link between habitual TV-watching and obesity, said Dr. Victor Strasburger of the University of New Mexico School of Medicine. The policy statement credits 1985 research by Drs. W. H. Dietz and S. L. Gortmaker that was published in the journal Pediatrics.

Dietz, a member of the academy committee that prepared the policy statement, has done follow-up research, Strasburger said.

“It could be that television watching is such a sedentary activity,” he said in a telephone interview Monday. “It could be because the nutritional messages on television are so terrible. Or it could be that kids usually . . . eat while they’re watching television. . . . It probably is all three.”

He said that TV programming still offers “a steady diet of violence” that leads some children to believe “that if you’re the good guy, (use of) violence can be acceptable” to solve some problems.