TV has its own benefits but when put to use properly. Your child can learn and discover a number of things pertaining to education, lifestyle and cultures. On the contrary, he can come across various other things that his parents don’t want him to learn. TV can have both positive and negative impact on your children. All depends on what he chooses to watch and for how much time.
How much TV should a child watch?
As per the resent research and studies carried out by various scientists, it has been observed that children should watch TV at most 2 hours. Less than 2 hours of watching ensures minimum strain on eyes and a flourishing lifestyle. Children who watch in excess of 2 hours are likely to encounter maladies including physical inactiveness, over-stuffiness, laziness and sluggishness. While watching TV, they do not realize but they crave for candied drinks like coke, thumbs up and keep on gulping fatty junk snacks. This is the age when children must spend more time in playing indoor and outdoor games, set in motion rather than becoming a humpty dumpty. Excess of TV watching can restrict the production of melatonin hormone inside the body, which performs essential functions in the immune system and sleeping pattern. Therefore, excess watching can make your child a victim of erratic sleeping.
Parents should ensure that the TV time of a child is balanced with time for other activities. Even if indoors, children can hone their hobbies, puzzle-solving skills and conversational skills. TV should not be a synonym for “doing something”. Infact, if there is a good balance between other daily activities like school, homework, sports, hobbies, the TV time should automatically fall into the minimum.
What Must Children Watch?
A child should not dedicate more than 2 hours of his time to TV watching. What he grabs in those 2 hours is congruent to what he chooses to watch. Parents can guide children what to watch. There are few channels that can easily capture your child’s attention like cartoon network or other cartoon related channels, music channels etc. It is natural that your child will fall in the purview of entertainment channels that are good to visualize. Scenes of violence, obscenity, disasters and horror could inhibit the child’s development. Infact, research suggests that children under 8 years of age do not understand that ads are made to sell a product- they could feel everything stated is true and those ads that aim at making something look bad (short child, fat child, black complexion etc) could find a permanents way into your child’s mind.
However, brain development and growth is possible only from those few channels, which your child might not want to even keep in the list like national geographic, discovery or news channels. It is solely parents responsibility how they can direct their children’s minds towards knowledge and not prodigal things.
