Wonderful to meet you, Mike. And Mrs. Teevee, how do you do? What an adorable little boy you have.
In my recent post about children, parenting or whatever, I almost wrote about how shocked I was the first time I saw parents show up at a family member's home with their small kids, whip out a videocassette and plop the kids down to watch some Disney cartoon or such like that they had seen a million times already. This would have been around 1990, and I was on record with my companion at the time about how bizarre it seemed to me that the educated, engaged parents would do such a thing without the slightest shame. Since then it has become commonplace to use television and videos as electronic babysitters, but I always remember how startled I was the first time I encountered the phenomenon. It seemed obvious to me that the kids would be getting less of developmental value from their nth viewing of some cartoon than from almost any other possible activity.
Now comes the suggestion that all this early TV watching might be the mysterious "environmental factor" behind the huge rise in autism cases that has been one of the big contemporary medical mysteries. An interesting study by Cornell University researchers seems to lend support the TV hypothesis. The methodology is creative, establishing a correlation between TV watching and precipitation, then examining autism rates in areas of western states with divergent precipitation levels, and also examining the relationship between when certain areas got cable television service an their autism rates. It also notes that you don't see expected levels of autism among the Amish (but I note that the Amish population might not have some predisposing genetic factor in the same proportion as it is present in the wider population). Anyway, it's all very interesting, and hardly conclusive.
I take a certain satisfaction that those shrill, conspiracy-minded, anti-intellectual parents who have decided childhood vaccinations (and insignificant amounts of mercury therein) caused their children's autism might in fact have only their own corner-cutting, lazy parenting to blame.
Gee, when I say it that way it sounds a little harsh. Perhaps multiple viewings of The Little Mermaid will placate me.
Labels: parenting
posted at 8:36 PM
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