Twenty-five years
ago, the Berlin wall had not yet come down, most people
only had a few TV channels, and no one had heard of a text
message. Back then we got a lot more sleep. This is according
to a new report from the Kaiser Family Foundation. The report
says that young children and adults sleep a couple hours
fewer on average these days. This trend coincides with a
rise in media use.
I've written about the connection between sleep and media
before. The Kaiser report has a new wrinkle, however. "There
is nothing inherent in most media use that would make it
damaging for sleep," says the report's author. In other
words, TV itself isn't keeping us up at night, but the way
we use TV, and keep our phones on for text messages, and
surf the net, might be doing more than keeping us up. The
report offers the following categories to explain the change:
the abundance of media formats, fungibility (the ability
to watch shows and movies whenever we want), increased use,
more conflict-oriented content, and the location of media
screens in the home, especially the bedroom.
All put together, these factors can really cut into our
shut-eye. And lack of sleep can impair brain development,
decision-making, creativity, and memory, and it can increase
accident-proneness and affect mood. The report also stresses
what while "there are some things we do know about
media and sleep, there is much more about which we are ignorant."
In my mind, that means we should be careful how much we
let media affect our sleep.
One of the findings from the Kaiser report made me sit up
in my chair: lack of sleep can affect metabolism. In other
words, media may impair sleep, which could in turn lead
to obesity. Another new study, this one from Thomas N. Robinson,
a Stanford Medical School researcher, found that reducing
media use may help prevent childhood obesity. This is another
topic I've covered before, and this study is similar to
others, but again, it holds a new wrinkle. According to
the author, "this is the first experimental study to
demonstrate a direct association between television, video
tape, and video game use and increased adiposity."
That last word is a fancy way of saying being overweight.
We finally have proof. The study also confirms what we've
found with the Switch program, that educating families about
how to make healthy media choices really works.
More and more, when I look at media issues it seems like
they're all connected. When you think about it, that makes
sense. That's what media do - they connect us to each other,
to other things and other places. These connections can
offer huge blessings. But at the same time, these blessings
bestow an important responsibility. We need to pay attention
to how one thing affects another. Don't believe me? Sleep
on it. I bet you'll agree in the morning.
David Walsh, Ph.D. is the founder of the
MediaWise Movement, a program of the National Institute
on Media and the Family (www.mediawise.org).
His latest book, No: Why Kids - of All Ages - Need to
Hear It and Ways Parents Can Say It (Free Press) is
available in bookstores.
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