Significance: The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends parents limit their children to a maximum of 2 hours of TV per day. Recent data suggest young children are exposed more than 3 hours. Excessive TV viewing is shown to increase a child's risk for obesity, attention deficit disorder, and propensity for violence. To effectively reduce TV viewing it is crucial to use an ecological framework to identify modifiable individual, social, and environmental factors related to excessive viewing. The purpose of this study was to examine predictors of TV viewing in a sample of young children.
Design: Data analyzed were 4,880 boys and 5,028 girls from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Class. Two multilevel regression analyses were specified for boys and girls, separately. The dependent variables were TV time during weekdays and weekends. The predictor variables at the first level were: Child – BMI status, ethnicity, physical activity, motor skills; Parent - education, hours worked, socioeconomic quintiles; and Household - TV rules, family activities. Predicator variables at the second level were Neighborhood - safety, social disorder and physical deterioration.
Results: At the individual level, boys of African American (0.27 hrs) and Hispanic (0.13 hrs) origin watched significantly more TV on weekdays in comparison to their White peers. Only African American boys (1.04 hrs) increased TV viewing on the weekend. For girls, African American decent was positively related to increased weekend (0.67 hrs) and weekday (0.33 hrs) viewing. On the weekend, Hispanic girls (-0.20 hrs) watched fewer hours. Overweight status was associated with excessive viewing during weekend and weekdays for boys (0.37 and 0.17 hrs) and girls (0.32 and 0.17 hrs). Not having rules for the number of hours their child could watch TV was positively associated with TV viewing on both weekdays (0.37 and 0.32 hrs) and weekend days (0.48 and 0.43 hrs) for boys and girls, respectively. Doing activities together as a family was associated with decreased TV viewing on the weekdays for girls (-0.10 hrs). At the neighborhood level, a safe neighborhood was associated with a reduction in the number of TV hours viewed during weekdays for both boys (-0.43 hrs) and girls (-0.25 hrs).
Conclusions: The major findings center on the influence of parents at the individual (rules for TV and family activities) and neighborhood (perceived safety) levels. Curriculum-driven interventions should focus on teaching parents skills regarding supervision, setting TV rules, and scheduling family activities in place of TV viewing.