Excessive TV Spurs Attention Trouble in Kids

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"Childhood TV viewing was associated with attention difficulties regardless of what you watch as an adolescent," he explained. "The amount of TV watched between 5 and 11 predicted problems between ages 13 and 15 regardless of what you watch between 13 and 15."

That doesn't mean it would be pointless to curtail your child's viewing habits now, he said. But it might only relieve short-term damage and not any longer-term effects.

"You may not be able to reverse what happened in childhood, but you can stop compounding the problem," he said.

The take-home message, Hancox concluded, is that parents should heed the American Academy of Pediatrics' recommendations, which say that children under two should watch no television at all, and that children over the age of two should watch no more than two hours per day -- recommendations that are in line with his findings

"This increase in risk kicked in with people who watched two hours of television per day," Hancox said. "For those who watched less, there was no increase in risk."

Hancox's findings are in general agreement with a 2004 study led by Dr. Dimitri Christakis of the Seattle's Children's Hospital and Regional Medical Center, which found a relationship between television watching at age 3 and attention problems at age 7. Yet they contradicted both Stevens' 2006 study, which found no link between TV viewing at age 5 and attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder at age 6, and an additional study out of Denmark.

Stevens lauded Hancox's effort. Yet she noted that, as a correlational study, it says nothing at all about causation. In that sense, it cannot answer a key question: Does TV viewing cause kids' attention problems, or do the parents of children with attention problems drop them in front of the TV more often to keep them occupied?

Additionally, the study makes no distinctions about what the children are watching, how much they are paying attention, and so on. Finally, Stevens questioned the lack of several key statistical variables.