Ban TV to Protect Children’s Health, Top Psychologist Says

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DAILY MAIL– TV should be banned for toddlers and severely rationed for other youngsters to protect their health and family life, a leading psychologist will tell MEPs today. Dr Aric Sigman claims that millions of children spending hours slumped in front of TVs and computers is ‘the greatest unacknowledged health scandal of our time’.

He says it is linked to ills ranging from obesity and heart disease to poor grades and lack of empathy. Some British children spend as much as seven-and-a-half hours a day in front of a screen  –  the equivalent of a full year of 24-hour days by the age of seven.

Dr Sigman, an Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society, believes that the youngest children, whose brains are undergoing massive development, should not watch any TV at all. From the ages of three to 12, boys and girls should be limited to an hour a day, rising to an hour and a half for teenagers.

The psychologist will tell an EU parliamentary working group on the ‘quality of childhood’ that TVs and computers should be kept out of bedrooms until a child is 15.

‘Governments throughout Europe regularly advise their citizens on the most intimate health matters: from daily grams of salt intake and units of alcohol to number of sexual partners,’ he will say.

‘Yet when it comes to children’s main waking activity, politicians are mysteriously lost for words.

‘Irrespective of what our children are watching or doing on the screen, a clear relationship is emerging between daily hours of screen time and negative medical, psychological, behavioural and educational consequences.

‘The more hours per day, the more likely the risk of these negative consequences and the greater their intensity.

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Photo by Nathan Janes of UNPLUG THE SIGNAL

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