How TV can harm childhood development The most popular babysitter in America is dumbing down our children. I'm talking, of course, about television. That's hardly news, I realize. But here's what is: TV can be even more detrimental for babies than for any other age group because it can inhibit their social, cognitive, and language development. According to a recent study published in the Archive of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, the problem isn't television itself - it's the lack of parent/child interaction. It doesn't matter if you're watching TV with your children or if you're plopping them down in front of programs designed to "enhance infant development." The bottom line is that any time spent in front of the TV is time you're not spending interacting with your children. The author of the study, Dr. Dimitri Christakis, said that for every hour of television watched, parent/child communication dropped 15 percent, which resulted in children hearing 770 less words from adults - and ultimately led to kids making fewer verbalizations. This isn't the first study that's raised red flags on this issue. Previous studies have shown that even DVDs and videos designed for babies can lead to a drop in language acquisition. Again, the problem isn't the DVDs themselves. It's the fact that digital media are functioning as substitute parents. And no matter what anyone says, Barney the Purple Dinosaur and Sponge Bob Square Pants just can't compete with the benefits of time spent with mom and dad. I'm sure you can imagine how widespread this problem is. In 30 percent of American households, the TV is on most of the day. It's all too easy to plop kids down in front of the boob tube babysitter to keep them preoccupied. It says more about the parents than the kids, but ultimately, the kids are the ones who are going to pay the price. Here's one that you ladies out there might appreciate: researchers have discovered a new regimen of injections that's been successful in working as a contraceptive… for guys. But here's the catch: the research was done in China. The burden of contraception has fallen on women for centuries, and while it's likely that the discovery of a legitimate male contraceptive would be welcomed by both sexes, I'm not sure that any medical solution from China is necessarily safe. The best thing I can say about the Chinese solution is that it's at least partially natural. The concoction that the researchers injected into more than a thousand male subjects was made up of 500 milligrams of testosterone undecanoate - a weak anabolic steroid - in tea seed oil. The study showed success, but it's hard to say what the long-term health risks could be. Plus, though the researchers did not report any adverse effects in the test subjects, neither did they point out exactly how the hormonal contraceptive did its work. With China's incredibly lax views on medical safety, I'd wait until U.S. doctors have success on the male hormone front before messing with my plumbing. | 
