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Written By: Admin | Updated : July 17, 2012 5:35 AM IST
Watching TV may not only be detrimental to your toddler's eyes, he may be at increased risk of obesity and reduction of muscle. A new research has found that children should not watch more than two hours of TV a day. Each hour of TV that a two to four-year-old watches elevates the risk of a larger waistline and reduction of muscle fitness. "We already knew that there is an association between pre-school television exposure and the body fat of fourth grade children, but this is the first study to describe more precisely what that association represents," said Linda Pagani. Parents were asked about their child's TV watching habits. Trained examiners took waist measurements and administered the standing long jump test to measure child muscular fitness. It was found, for example that each weekly hour of TV at 29 months of age corresponds to a decrease of about a third of a centimetre in the distance a child is able to jump. This decrease in the fitness of the child can lead to decreased interest in sports and preexsstent ability to do well in the field.
Along with their parents, 1,314 children from the Quebec Longitudinal Study of Child Development database participated in this study. When the children were 2.5 to 4.5 years of age, their parents reported how many hours of TV during the week and weekend they watched. The average was 8.8 hours per week at the onset of the study, a figure that increased on average by 6 hours over the next two years to reach 14.8 hours per week by the age of 4.5 years. Thus, 15 percent of the children participating in the study were already watching over 18 hours per week according to their parent's reports at that time.
Source: IANS
