A longitudinal analysis of children's media use and time choices

Media use is often implicated in debates about how young people should use their time for optimal benefit. In the child development literature and in more popular discourses, media use, and particularly television viewing, has long been associated with a number of serious social problems, including the inability to read well and/or concentrate on learning tasks, and the lack of active play or exercise, which is seen as a contributing factor in obesity. This attribution arises because it is widely believed that TV (or perhaps we should now say \u27lean back media\u27) interferes with activities that are seen as more developmentally appropriate, such as reading or being read to, interacting with parents (especially for very young children), engaging in active or creative play, or homework (Vandewater et al., 2006)