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'Screen Time' Harms School Time
By AFA Journal
AgapePress
November 30, 2006

(AgapePress) -- A recently released study from New York's Albert Einstein College confirmed that students need to turn off the TV and other media devices and focus on their schoolwork.

The study involved 4,058 middle school students ages 9 to 15, and the findings are based on self-perceptions of school performance rather than actual grades or test scores. The results of the study revealed that the greater the weekday media exposure the poorer the academic performance.

Among students who abstained from watching television during the week, 50 percent had an excellent school performance in contrast to the 24 percent who had watched a weekly total of four to seven hours of TV.

"It is clearly known within the scientific and medical communities that screen time has a reverse impact on the way a student will do in school," said Robert Kesten, executive director of the Center for Screen-Time Awareness. The minds of students who engage in an inordinately high amount of media "screen time" are elsewhere, Kesten explained.

Weekend television watching did not appear to have a harmful affect on schoolwork.

Parents should also monitor the content of programs their children view when they do watch TV because the study found that adult programming and R-rated movies also cause students to suffer academically. Dr. Iman Sharif of Albert Einstein College of Medicine suggested that such adult content engaged the study's participants in "higher levels of sensation seeking and rebelliousness, [that led] to poor school performance."

Sharif concluded: "Our data support the recommendation that parents limit weekday television and video game time to less than one hour and restrict access to adult media by limiting exposure to cable movie channels and R-rated movies and videos."

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