Jennifer Aubrey, University of Missouri, Columbia

Guys who check out the sexy female models in so-called lad magazines such as Maxim have more body-image problems than their pals, a new study finds.

While it is fairly well-known that women feel worse about their bodies after viewing other females in Cosmopolitan or Glamour, guys apparently take the same knock after perusing the lingerie-clad women spread across the pages of Maxim, FHM and Stuff.

The researchers say that by looking at idealized, sexualized women, guys feel less-than because they start thinking they need to measure up on the attractiveness scale to snag such a mate.

"Men make the inference that in order to be sexual and romantic with women of the similar caliber they see in Maxim magazine, they also need to be attractive," said lead researcher Jennifer Aubrey of the Department of Communications at the University of Missouri, Columbia.

Girls and young women who devote much time to the Internet, get too little sleep or regularly drink alcohol are more likely than their peers to put on excess weight, a new study suggests.The researchers, who followed more than 5,000 girls between 14 and 21 years old for 1 year, found that the more spare time girls spent on the Internet, the more their body mass index (BMI) increased.

Similar patterns were seen when the researchers looked at alcohol consumption and sleep. In the latter case, lack of sleep was linked to greater gains in BMI — a measure of weight in relation to height.

The findings, reported in The Journal of Pediatrics, add to evidence implicating each of these three habits in promoting weight gain.

The effect of each may be small, but over time the pounds can add up, according to the researchers, led by Dr. Catherine S. Berkey of Brigham & Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston.

The study involved 5,036 girls and young women who were surveyed regarding the number of recreational hours per week they spent on the Internet, which ranged from 1 to 5 hours, to 16-plus hours, as well as how long they typically slept each night (anywhere from 5 hours or less, to 9 hours or more) and how much alcohol they usually drank (ranging from none to two or more drinks per week).

In general, the researchers found, as Internet use climbed, so did BMI, particularly among girls younger than 18 years old.

The children surveyed often rationalized their downloading by saying that everyone does it. Many also pointed to downloads made by their own parents as an implicit form of authorizationRead the full Brief, 08/11/2007

Depending on the circumstances, these harassing or "cyberbullying" behaviors may be truly threatening, merely annoying or relatively benign. But several patterns are clear: girls are more likely than boys to be targets; and teens who share their identities and thoughts online are more likely to be targets than those who lead less active online lives.Read the full Brief, 06/27/2007

Four out of five parents that use parental control software don't turn it on, despite being concerned about their children's online safety, says McAfee.

Research by the security firm revealed a further 52 percent of parents admitted they never changed the security settings on their parental controls software while 20 percent admitted to being unsure as to whether they level of security. Nearly two thirds of parents also said they hadn't raised the subject of online security with their children.

McAfee highlighted that just under half of parents claim to monitor their children's online activities, however 30 percent said they left their children alone in their bedroom to surf the web. The survey also highlighted that 26 percent of all five to seven year olds have a computer in their bedroom and 17 percent of them are allowed to browse the web.

Meanwhile 46 percent of parent's said they were unaware their children had any social networking profiles on sites such as Facebook.

When it comes to maintaining the family PC, the task tends to fall to dads, with 88 percent of men saying they were responsible for installing and monitoring security software on their home PC. The survey showed that twice as many Dad's compared to Mum's actively seek out information on the latest online threats and 13 percent of mum's claimed their kids were more internet savvy than they were.

Much has been made about violent video games and how they impact children over the past decade and legislatures and activist groups alike have tried to find ways to stop them from getting in the hands of minors. And with the help of retailers, most laws have tried to make it impossible for those under the age of 17 to buy an M-rated game. But according to a recent Nielsen survey, 17 percent of Grand Theft Auto IV buyers were underage.

Nielsen found that of the 6,000 respondents, 17 percent of all buyers were younger than 17 -- the children were aged between 6 and 17 -- and of those younger buyers, 61 percent bought the game themselves, while 39 percent had a relative or friend buy it for them. In those cases where someone else bought the game for the kids, 80 percent were the child's parent or guardian and 10 percent said their older siblings bought the game for them.

Dateline NBC

All of Dateline’s predator investigations have been predicated on the idea that teenagers are willing, and sometimes eager, to share very personal information online. What are kids really up to on the computer? They may not always want to tell you, but they told Dateline in a new nationwide survey. In a survey conducted by The Intelligence Group, Dateline questioned 500 teenagers across the country, ages 14 to 18, about their computer habits.

When asked if they chat online to people they’ve never met before, an overwhelming majority said “yes,” whether it’s “all the time,” “sometimes,” or “not very often.” When asked if someone they’ve met online has wanted to meet them in person, 58 percent said “yes.” And 29 percent said they’ve had a “scary” experience online.

When asked if they talk about personal information on the Internet— things like aname, a picture, an address, a birthday, about half the teens said “yes.” We also asked if they did things online they would not want their parents to know about. Again, about half said “yes.”

More than 90 percent told us that they were responsible when they used the computer… but said that they thought friends, classmates, and other teens were not behaving responsibly online.

Below are the results: Question 1: Have you ever met someone online via e-mail, instant messenger, chat room, etc.?
MALE /FEMALE /14-18 /19-24
Yes 71% 76% 66% 66%
No 29% 24% 34% 34%

Question 2:How often would you say you talk to people via the Internet that you don\'t know, but have met online?

MALE FEMALE 14-18 YEARS OLD 19-24 YEARS OLD
All the time 24% 32% 15% 23%
Very Often 18% 19% 17% 19%
Sometimes 26% 26% 26% 28%
Not very often 26% 21% 33% 26%
Not at all 6% 3% 10% 4%

Question 3: Has anyone you have met online ever asked to meet you in person?
Total MALE FEMALE 14-18 19-24
Yes 63% 65% 62% 58% 68%
No 37% 35% 38% 42% 32%

Question 4: Have you ever had a scary online experience, or an online experience that has made you feel uncomfortable in any way?

MALE FEMALE 14-18 19-24
Yes 29% 35% 29% 35%
No 71% 65% 71% 65%

Question 5:You mentioned that you had an online experience that made you uncomfortable. Did you tell anyone about it?
MALE FEMALE 14-18 19-24
Yes 61% 61% 63% 60%
No 39% 39% 38% 40%

Question 6: Have you ever done anything online that you would not want your parents to know about?

MALE FEMALE 14-18 19-24
Yes 59% 40% 49% 50%
No 41% 60% 51% 50%

Question 7: Do you talk about yourself or personal things online?

MALE FEMALE 14-18 19-24
Yes 58% 44% 47% 55%
No 42% 56% 53% 45%

Question 8: Do you think your parents know what you\'re really doing when you\'re on the computer?
MALE FEMALE 14-18 19-24
Yes 46% 60% 55% 51%
No 54% 40% 45% 49%

Question 9: Do you think your parents would mind if they knew what you were really doing on the computer?
MALE FEMALE 14-18 19-24
Yes 46% 50% 54% 42%
No 54% 50% 46% 58%

Question 10:Do you think you use the computer responsibly?
TOTAL MALE FEMALE 14-18 19-24
Yes 92% 90% 94% 91% 93%
No 8% 10% 6% 9% 7%

Question 11: Would you say that most people your age use the computer responsibly?
TOTAL MALE FEMALE 14-18 19-24 Yes 39% 42% 36% 30% 47%
No 61% 58% 64% 70% 53%

© 2006 MSNBC Interactive METHODOLGY

This survey, by The Intelligence Group, was conducted online in January of 2006. The total sample is of 500 teens, and a margin of error is 4.4 percent. The Intelligence Group is a leading trend forecasting and market research firm. Read the full Brief, 04/28/2006

Yet most digital-age parents aren\'t media-haters despite a recent flurry of stories about sexual predators lurking on social networking sites like MySpace.com and clips of teenage buffoonery circulating on video-sharing sites, according to a national survey released today by San Francisco-based Common Sense Media.

Read the full Brief, 06/07/2006

Jaana Juvonen, University of California--Los Angeles

Nearly three in four teenagers say they were bullied online at least once during a recent 12-month period, and only one in 10 reported such cyber-bullying to parents or other adults, according to a new study by UCLA psychologists.

Of those who were bullied online, 85 percent also have been bullied at school, the psychologists found. The probability of getting bullied online was substantially higher for those who have been the victims of school bullying.

"Bullying affects millions of students and is not limited to school grounds," said lead study author Jaana Juvonen, a professor of psychology and chair of UCLA's developmental psychology program. "Bullying on the Internet looks similar to what kids do face-to-face in school. The Internet is not functioning as a separate environment but is connected with the social lives of kids in school. Our findings suggest that especially among heavy users of the Internet, cyber-bullying is a common experience, and the forms of online and in-school bullying are more alike than different."
 
The research is based on an anonymous Web-based survey of 1,454 participants between the ages of 12 and 17, who were recruited through a nationally popular teen website from August through October 2005. The psychologists' findings appear in the September issue of the Journal of School Health.

Forty-one percent of the teenagers surveyed reported between one and three online bullying incidents over the course of a year, 13 percent reported four to six incidents and 19 percent reported seven or more incidents, Juvonen said.

According to a new national poll commissioned by Cable in the Classroom and conducted by Harris Interactive®, 71 percent of parents also think a major portion of the responsibility for ensuring children’s safety on the Internet falls to schools. The poll was released today at the PTA Back-to-School Media Briefing held at the New York City Public Library.

“Parents want to take primary responsibility for guiding their kids’ use of the Internet,” said Douglas Levin, senior director of education policy for Cable in the Classroom. “Yet, as the Internet continues to change and evolve, most parents don’t feel very knowledgeable about how to ensure children’s Internet safety and are looking for schools to help.”Read the full Brief, 08/10/2006

*42% of parents don\'t review the content of their teen(s) are reading and/or writing in chat rooms or instant messages;

*Parents are not familiar with the most common IM shorthand/lingo, i.e.,

*57% of parents don\'t know LOL (laughing out loud)

*68% don\'t now BRB (be right back)

*92% were unaware that A/S/L means age/sex/location

*95% of weren\'t familiar with POS (parents over shoulder)and P911 (parent alert);

*28% of parents don\'t know if their teens are speaking with strangers online;

*30% of parents let their teens use computers in private areas of the home (e.g. bedroom, office).

--Cynopsis: Kids 05/24/05Read the full Brief, 05/24/2005

Nearly half - 46 percent - of US "tweens" (those age 8-12) use a cell phone, and safety is the primary reason that parents cite for their childrens' having a mobile phone, according to Nielsen's newly launched Mobile Kids Insights survey.

The survey also estimates that US tweens - a population segment of 20 million - get their own cell phone between age 10 and 11, on average.
Some 55 percent of tweens who own a cell phone send text messages and 21 percent download ringtones, according to the study.

Robert Hart, Intuitive Media; Professor Karen Pine,  University of Hertfordshire School of Psychology, United Kingdom

The Learning in the Family report which looked at how families are involved in children’s learning, was funded by Becta, commissioned by Intuitive Media Research Services and co-authored by Robert Hart of Intuitive Media and Professor Karen Pine, at the University’s School of Psychology. They conducted two online surveys with a sample of 4,606 children aged six to fourteen, going into more depth with a further 2,535 children and then interviewed twelve families.

The aim was to assess how parents engage with children learning new technology and how parents could better support their children’s learning.

The survey found that 94 percent of the girls said that they used a computer or laptop compared with only 88 per cent of the boys. It also found that 50 per cent of children chose their mothers to help them to use new technologies, versus 22 per cent, which chose their fathers.

 
Another key finding was that 40 percent of children surveyed wanted to see an improvement in parental involvement and many of the parents interviewed said that they would like to learn more through online courses, through the television or through their local school or college.

IN a world with grocery store television screens, digitally delivered movie libraries and cellphone video clips, the average American is exposed to 61 minutes of TV ads and promotions a day.

Some people may think that amount seems excessive. But “people don’t seem to be getting up and running away,” said Jack Wakshlag, chief research officer at Turner Broadcasting.

Tracy L.M. Kennedy, University of Toronto; Aaron Smith, Research Specialist, Pew Internet Project; Amy Tracy Wells, Research Fellow, Pew Internet Project; Barry Wellman, University of Toronto

The internet and cell phones have become central components of modern family life. Among all household types, the traditional nuclear family has the highest rate of technology usage and ownership.

A national survey has found that households with a married couple and minor children are more likely than other household types -- such as single adults, homes with unrelated adults, or couples without children to have cell phones and use the internet.

The survey shows that these high rates of technology ownership affect family life. In particular, cell phones allow family members to stay more regularly in touch even when they are not physically together. Moreover, many members of married-with-children households view material online together.

CHICAGO — They think it's pointless, narcissistic. Some don't even know what it is.

Even so, more young adults and teens — normally at the cutting edge of technology — are finally coming around to Twitter, using it for class or work, monitoring the minutiae of celebrities' lives.

It's not always love at first tweet, though. Many of them are doing it grudgingly, perhaps because a friend pressures them or a teacher or boss makes them try the 140-character microblogging site.

 A small U.S. and German study has found that text messaging may help children fight off obesity by taking advantage of the fact that many youngsters are glued to their cell phones.

Researchers from the University of North Carolina and Germany's University of Heidelberg found text messaging could be used to reduce children's chances of becoming overweight or obese later in life by helping them monitor and modify their behavior.

The study, published in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, involved 58 children aged 5 to 13 and their parents who took part in group education sessions to encourage them to increase physical activity, decrease time spent watching television, and cut back on sugar-sweetened drinks.

The participants were divided into three groups -- one that reported self-monitoring via text messaging, another group with a paper monitoring diary, and a no-monitoring control group.

The study found that children in the text messaging group were far more likely to stick to their goals -- 43 percent -- than those with a paper diary -- 19 percent.

Sydney Jones, Research Assistant; Susanna Fox, Associate Director

More teens play online games than visit social networking sites. Also, the number of teens using email has dropped significantly over the past four years.

The new report, Generations Online in 2009, found that despite the commonly held perception that teens live on sites like MySpace and Facebook, 78 percent of teens 12-17 play online games while just 65 percent use social networking sites. Those numbers diverge for the Generation Y found Pew, as just half of adults 18-32 play online games while 67 percent of them are on social networking sites.

Despite the fact that nearly a third of teens are not social networkers, these sites, along with text messaging and instant messaging are quickly shoving aside email as a preferred form of Web communication for this group. Pew’s research found that 73 percent of teens 12-17 use email—still as sizable number--but down considerably from the 89 percent figure recorded in 2005.

Four out of five parents that use parental control software don't turn it on, despite being concerned about their children's online safety, says McAfee.

Research by the security firm revealed a further 52 percent of parents admitted they never changed the security settings on their parental controls software while 20 percent admitted to being unsure as to whether they level of security. Nearly two thirds of parents also said they hadn't raised the subject of online security with their children.

McAfee highlighted that just under half of parents claim to monitor their children's online activities, however 30 percent said they left their children alone in their bedroom to surf the web. The survey also highlighted that 26 percent of all five to seven year olds have a computer in their bedroom and 17 percent of them are allowed to browse the web.

Meanwhile 46 percent of parent's said they were unaware their children had any social networking profiles on sites such as Facebook.

When it comes to maintaining the family PC, the task tends to fall to dads, with 88 percent of men saying they were responsible for installing and monitoring security software on their home PC. The survey showed that twice as many Dad's compared to Mum's actively seek out information on the latest online threats and 13 percent of mum's claimed their kids were more internet savvy than they were.

 Henry Jenkins, Ravi Purushotma, Katherine Clinton, Margaret Weigel, and Alice J. Robison

A central goal of this report is to shift the focus of the conversation about the digital divide from questions of technological access to those of opportunities to participate and to develop the cultural competencies and social skills needed for full involvement. Schools as institutions have been slow to react to the emergence of this new participatory culture; the greatest opportunity for change is currently found in afterschool programs and informal learning communities.

Schools and afterschool programs must devote more attention to fostering what we call the new media literacies: a set of cultural competencies and social skills that young people need in the new media landscape. Participatory culture shifts the focus of literacy from one of individual expression to community involvement.The new literacies almost all involve social skills developed through collaboration and networking.These skills build on the foundation of traditional literacy, research skills, technical skills, and critical analysis skills taught in the classroom.

Much has been made about violent video games and how they impact children over the past decade and legislatures and activist groups alike have tried to find ways to stop them from getting in the hands of minors. And with the help of retailers, most laws have tried to make it impossible for those under the age of 17 to buy an M-rated game. But according to a recent Nielsen survey, 17 percent of Grand Theft Auto IV buyers were underage.

Nielsen found that of the 6,000 respondents, 17 percent of all buyers were younger than 17 -- the children were aged between 6 and 17 -- and of those younger buyers, 61 percent bought the game themselves, while 39 percent had a relative or friend buy it for them. In those cases where someone else bought the game for the kids, 80 percent were the child's parent or guardian and 10 percent said their older siblings bought the game for them.

Carrie James, Katie Davis, Andrea Flores, John M. Francis, Lindsay Pettingill, Margaret Rundle, and Howard Gardner
Project Zero
Harvard Graduate School of Education

The new digital media are a frontier rich with opportunities and risks, particularly for young people. Through digital technologies, young people are participating in a range of activities, including social networking, blogging, vlogging, gaming, instant messaging, downloading music and other content, uploading and sharing their own creations, and collaborating with others in various ways. In this paper, we explore the ethical fault lines that are raised by such digital pursuits. We argue that five key issues are at stake in the new media, including identity, privacy, ownership and authorship, credibility, and participation. Drawing on evidence from informant interviews, emerging scholarship on new media, and theoretical insights from psychology, sociology, political science, and cultural studies, we explore the ways in which youth may be redefining identity, privacy, ownership, credibility, & participation as they engage with the new digital media. For each issue, we describe and compare offline and online understandings and then explore the particular ethical promises and perils that surface online.

Common Sense Media, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center

In a new, nationally representative poll from Common Sense Media and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center (JGCC), American parents agreed by a wide margin that digital media skills are important to kids’ success in the 21st century, but they also expressed skepticism about whether digital media could contribute to the development of skills like communicating, working with others, and establishing civic responsibility.

Three out of four parents in the survey (75 percent) agreed that knowing how to use digital media is as beneficial for kids as traditional skills like reading and math, and 83 percent of parents said that digital media gives their children the skills they need to succeed in the 21st century.

But parents expressed skepticism about the value of many digital media platforms, particularly when it came to whether digital media could teach kids how to communicate and collaborate, skills that are essential in a 21st-century workforce. For example:

• 67 percent of parents said they did not think the Web helped teach their kids how to communicate.
• 87 percent of parents said they did not believe the Web helped their kids learn how to work with others.
• Three out of four parents do not believe the Web can teach kids to be responsible in their communities.

Mizuko Ito, Heather Horst, Matteo Bittanti, danah boyd, Becky Herr-Stephenson, Patricia G. Lange, C.J. Pascoe, and Laura Robinson with Sonja Baumer, Rachel Cody, Dilan Mahendran, Katynka Martínez, Dan Perkel, Christo Sims, and Lisa Tripp

Digital media and online communication have become pervasive in the lives of youth in the United States. Social network sites, online games, video-sharing sites, and gadgets such as iPods and mobile phones are now fixtures of youth culture. They have so permeated young lives that it is hard to believe that less than a decade ago these technologies had barely registered in the lives of U.S. children and teens. Today’s youth may be coming of age and struggling for autonomy and identity as did their predecessors, but they are doing so amid reconfigured contexts for communication, friendship, play, and self-expression.

We are wary of claims that a digital generation is overthrowing culture and knowledge as we know it and that its members are engaging in new media in ways radically different from those of older generations. At the same time, we also believe that this generation is at a unique historical moment tied to longer-term and systemic changes in sociability and culture. While the pace of technological change may seem dizzying, the underlying practices of sociability, learning, play, and self-expression are undergoing a slower evolution, growing out of resilient social and cultural structures that youth inhabit in diverse ways in their everyday lives. We sought to place both the commonalities and diversity of youth new media practice in the context of this broader social and cultural ecology.

According to AdMob, there are many similarities between iPhone and iPod touch users in the US, especially in the demographic makeup of each group in areas such as age and household income. iPhone users are generally older. 69% of iPod touch users are between 13-24 years of age, while this same age segment represents just 26% of iPhone users. 31% of iPhone users are 35-49 years old, while only 12% of iPod touch users fall in this age segment. In total, 74% of iPhone users are over the age of 25, compared to 31% of iPod touch users.

To shed light on how different generations are “consuming” media — and what their future media preferences are likely to be — Deloitte LLP's Technology, Media and Telecommunications (TMT) practice commissioned an extensive survey on the evolving role of media in America. This State of the Media Democracy survey offers a generational reality check on the usage of current media platforms/devices and what the future may hold.

Millennials are leading the way, embracing new technologies, games, entertainment platforms, user-generated content and communication tools — creating a “trickle up” effect where the older generations are learning from them. The survey found that despite their eagerness to embrace new media, Millennials have an affinity for “traditional” media, such as print publications and television. Almost six in 10 survey respondents (58 percent) said they use magazines to find out about what's "cool and hip," such as clothes, cars and music. Perhaps more important, almost three-quarters (71 percent) enjoy reading print magazines even though they know they could find most of the same information online.

Beverly Plester, Clare Wood, Puja Joshi

Text speak (or, rather, TXT SP3EAK) not only doesn't harm literacy in children, researchers have found, but its use is actually positively correlated with their language and reading skills. ... children who use "textisms" on mobile phones tend to have a better grasp of (normal) word reading, vocabulary, and phonological awareness, even when controlled for age, memory, and how long they have owned a phone.

Researchers ... studied the texting behavior of 88 British children between the ages of 10 and 12 and how it related to their school literacy skills. They gave the kids 10 different scenarios and asked them to write text messages to describe each situation; their textisms were split into categories (shortenings, contractions, acronyms, symbols, non-conventional spellings, etc.) and analyzed for their use of language as it compared to their school performance.

"As expected, we found associations between textism use and phonological awareness," wrote the researchers in their report. "What is most important, the extent of the children's textism use was able to predict significant variance in their word reading ability[...] This suggests that children's use of textisms is not only positively associated with word reading ability, but that it may be contributing to reading development in a way that goes beyond simple phonologically based explanations."

Megan A. Moreno, Dimitri A. Christakis, et al.

Scientists at Seattle Children's Research Institute and the University of Washington randomly selected 500 MySpace profiles belonging to self-described 18-year-olds in the U.S. to determine what sort of information the average teen was sharing online. Their conclusion? The kids are not alright. Well, half of them anyways. Nearly 54% of the selected profiles revealed details about risky sexual lifestyles, drug addictions and violent encounters with peers.

Jaana Juvonen, University of California--Los Angeles

Nearly three in four teenagers say they were bullied online at least once during a recent 12-month period, and only one in 10 reported such cyber-bullying to parents or other adults, according to a new study by UCLA psychologists.

Of those who were bullied online, 85 percent also have been bullied at school, the psychologists found. The probability of getting bullied online was substantially higher for those who have been the victims of school bullying.

"Bullying affects millions of students and is not limited to school grounds," said lead study author Jaana Juvonen, a professor of psychology and chair of UCLA's developmental psychology program. "Bullying on the Internet looks similar to what kids do face-to-face in school. The Internet is not functioning as a separate environment but is connected with the social lives of kids in school. Our findings suggest that especially among heavy users of the Internet, cyber-bullying is a common experience, and the forms of online and in-school bullying are more alike than different."
 
The research is based on an anonymous Web-based survey of 1,454 participants between the ages of 12 and 17, who were recruited through a nationally popular teen website from August through October 2005. The psychologists' findings appear in the September issue of the Journal of School Health.

Forty-one percent of the teenagers surveyed reported between one and three online bullying incidents over the course of a year, 13 percent reported four to six incidents and 19 percent reported seven or more incidents, Juvonen said.

Some 8 million US kids and teens spent time in virtual worlds on a regular basis last year, according to eMarketer, which expects that figure to grow to 15 million by 2013. The market research firm estimates that 37% of kids 3-11 play in virtual worlds at least once a month, and 54% will by 2013. According to conference organizer Virtual Worlds Management, as of this past January, there were 112 virtual worlds aimed at people under 18, with another 81 in development.

A new survey of Washington students shows most are making good choices about their health. Still, far too many regularly use alcohol, tobacco, drugs, and engage in risky behavior.

The Healthy Youth Survey focuses on health risk behaviors. The anonymous voluntary survey is taken every two years by more than 210,000 public school kids around the state in grades six, eight, 10, and 12. I

Some specific findings of the survey include:

- Among 8th-graders, 41 percent who drink alcohol say they get it from home, and about 24 percent say their parents haven't talked with them about alcohol and its risks.
- Seven percent of 8th and 10th-graders gambled at least once a month in the past year.
- Fewer students in grades 6, 8, and 12 say they enjoy being at school than in 2006. About one in five 8th-graders report skipping school in the past month.
- About 8 percent of 8th and 10th-graders have been a member of a gang during the past year.
- Among 6th-graders who sometimes feel sad or hopeless, about one in four say they do not have or are not sure if they have an adult in their life to talk to when they feel sad.
 - About 9 percent of 10th-graders report they tried to commit suicide in the past year, which is a similar rate to recent years.
- Only about 70 percent of 10th-graders say they always wear a seat belt -- similar to 2006.

Amanda Lenhart, Pew and Internet Life Project

According to a study by Pew Internet and American Life Project, 35 percent of US adults who use the Internet have a profile on at least one social network such as Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter. This is a significant increase over just eight percent in 2005, but still a far cry from the 65 percent of US teens aged 17 and younger who use social networks. While adult social network usage doubled in a year to reach 16 percent in 2006, it took another two years to double again around December 2008.

IN a world with grocery store television screens, digitally delivered movie libraries and cellphone video clips, the average American is exposed to 61 minutes of TV ads and promotions a day.

Some people may think that amount seems excessive. But “people don’t seem to be getting up and running away,” said Jack Wakshlag, chief research officer at Turner Broadcasting.

Robert Hart, Intuitive Media; Professor Karen Pine,  University of Hertfordshire School of Psychology, United Kingdom

The Learning in the Family report which looked at how families are involved in children’s learning, was funded by Becta, commissioned by Intuitive Media Research Services and co-authored by Robert Hart of Intuitive Media and Professor Karen Pine, at the University’s School of Psychology. They conducted two online surveys with a sample of 4,606 children aged six to fourteen, going into more depth with a further 2,535 children and then interviewed twelve families.

The aim was to assess how parents engage with children learning new technology and how parents could better support their children’s learning.

The survey found that 94 percent of the girls said that they used a computer or laptop compared with only 88 per cent of the boys. It also found that 50 per cent of children chose their mothers to help them to use new technologies, versus 22 per cent, which chose their fathers.

 
Another key finding was that 40 percent of children surveyed wanted to see an improvement in parental involvement and many of the parents interviewed said that they would like to learn more through online courses, through the television or through their local school or college.

Supports studies finding relationship between high video game play and ADD

AMES, Iowa – Parents have long lectured their children about the mind-numbing effects of playing video games all day. And a new Iowa State University study has found that high volume action video game players -- those who play around 40 hours per week -- actually had more difficulty keeping focused on tasks requiring longer, more proactive attention than those who played video games less than a couple of hours a week.

The study, published online last week in the latest issue of the professional journal Psychophysiology, also supports research published within the last year establishing a positive association between being addicted to playing video games and having Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD).

Tracy L.M. Kennedy, University of Toronto; Aaron Smith, Research Specialist, Pew Internet Project; Amy Tracy Wells, Research Fellow, Pew Internet Project; Barry Wellman, University of Toronto

The internet and cell phones have become central components of modern family life. Among all household types, the traditional nuclear family has the highest rate of technology usage and ownership.

A national survey has found that households with a married couple and minor children are more likely than other household types -- such as single adults, homes with unrelated adults, or couples without children to have cell phones and use the internet.

The survey shows that these high rates of technology ownership affect family life. In particular, cell phones allow family members to stay more regularly in touch even when they are not physically together. Moreover, many members of married-with-children households view material online together.

CHICAGO — They think it's pointless, narcissistic. Some don't even know what it is.

Even so, more young adults and teens — normally at the cutting edge of technology — are finally coming around to Twitter, using it for class or work, monitoring the minutiae of celebrities' lives.

It's not always love at first tweet, though. Many of them are doing it grudgingly, perhaps because a friend pressures them or a teacher or boss makes them try the 140-character microblogging site.

Among those who blog, 69 percent say they’ve shared drawings, stories, photos or videos online, while only 24 percent of non-blogging teens do the same. Similarly, 58 percent of blogging teens have created their own web page, compared with 14 percent of online teens without blogs. The report also said that 51 percent of online teens say they’ve downloaded music compared to just 18 percent of online adults surveyed at the end of 2004.

-Cynopsis:Kids! 11/3/05Read the full Brief, 11/03/2005

The results highlight that this is a generation of teens eager to share their thoughts, experiences, and creations with the wider Internet population.

Some key findings of the study include:

* 33% of online teens share their own creative content online, such as artwork, photos, stories or videos

* 32% say that they have created or worked on web pages or blogs for others, including friends or school assignments

* 22% report keeping their own personal webpage

* 19% of online teens keep a blog, and 38% of online teens read blogs

* 19% of internet-using teens say they remix content they find online into their own artistic creations.

Teens are often much more enthusiastic authors and readers of blogs than their adult counterparts. Teen bloggers, led by older girls, are a major part of this tech-savvy cohort. "For American teens, blogs are about self-expression, building relationships, and carving out a presence online," said Amanda Lenhart, co-author of the report entitled, "Teen Content Creators and Consumers."

51% of online teens report downloading music, compared to just 18% of adults who report similar behavior. Mary Madden, a Research Specialist at the Project and co-author of the report, said "At a time when social norms around digital content don\'t always appear to conform with the letter of the law, many teens are aware of the restrictions on copyrighted material, but believe it\'s still permissible to share some content for free." 75% agree with the statement that, "Music downloading and file-sharing is so easy to do, it\'s unrealistic to expect people not to do it."

Read the full Brief, 12/22/2005

Sydney Jones, Research Assistant; Susanna Fox, Associate Director

More teens play online games than visit social networking sites. Also, the number of teens using email has dropped significantly over the past four years.

The new report, Generations Online in 2009, found that despite the commonly held perception that teens live on sites like MySpace and Facebook, 78 percent of teens 12-17 play online games while just 65 percent use social networking sites. Those numbers diverge for the Generation Y found Pew, as just half of adults 18-32 play online games while 67 percent of them are on social networking sites.

Despite the fact that nearly a third of teens are not social networkers, these sites, along with text messaging and instant messaging are quickly shoving aside email as a preferred form of Web communication for this group. Pew’s research found that 73 percent of teens 12-17 use email—still as sizable number--but down considerably from the 89 percent figure recorded in 2005.

Four out of five parents that use parental control software don't turn it on, despite being concerned about their children's online safety, says McAfee.

Research by the security firm revealed a further 52 percent of parents admitted they never changed the security settings on their parental controls software while 20 percent admitted to being unsure as to whether they level of security. Nearly two thirds of parents also said they hadn't raised the subject of online security with their children.

McAfee highlighted that just under half of parents claim to monitor their children's online activities, however 30 percent said they left their children alone in their bedroom to surf the web. The survey also highlighted that 26 percent of all five to seven year olds have a computer in their bedroom and 17 percent of them are allowed to browse the web.

Meanwhile 46 percent of parent's said they were unaware their children had any social networking profiles on sites such as Facebook.

When it comes to maintaining the family PC, the task tends to fall to dads, with 88 percent of men saying they were responsible for installing and monitoring security software on their home PC. The survey showed that twice as many Dad's compared to Mum's actively seek out information on the latest online threats and 13 percent of mum's claimed their kids were more internet savvy than they were.

The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop released a report yesterday that specifies how increased national investment in research-based digital games can play a cost-effective and transformative role. The report Game Changer: Investing in Digital Play to Advance Children’s Learning and Health provides recommendations for the media industry, government, philanthropy and academia to harness the appeal of digital games to improve children’s health and learning.

Mizuko Ito, Heather Horst, Matteo Bittanti, danah boyd, Becky Herr-Stephenson, Patricia G. Lange, C.J. Pascoe, and Laura Robinson with Sonja Baumer, Rachel Cody, Dilan Mahendran, Katynka Martínez, Dan Perkel, Christo Sims, and Lisa Tripp

Digital media and online communication have become pervasive in the lives of youth in the United States. Social network sites, online games, video-sharing sites, and gadgets such as iPods and mobile phones are now fixtures of youth culture. They have so permeated young lives that it is hard to believe that less than a decade ago these technologies had barely registered in the lives of U.S. children and teens. Today’s youth may be coming of age and struggling for autonomy and identity as did their predecessors, but they are doing so amid reconfigured contexts for communication, friendship, play, and self-expression.

We are wary of claims that a digital generation is overthrowing culture and knowledge as we know it and that its members are engaging in new media in ways radically different from those of older generations. At the same time, we also believe that this generation is at a unique historical moment tied to longer-term and systemic changes in sociability and culture. While the pace of technological change may seem dizzying, the underlying practices of sociability, learning, play, and self-expression are undergoing a slower evolution, growing out of resilient social and cultural structures that youth inhabit in diverse ways in their everyday lives. We sought to place both the commonalities and diversity of youth new media practice in the context of this broader social and cultural ecology.

To shed light on how different generations are “consuming” media — and what their future media preferences are likely to be — Deloitte LLP's Technology, Media and Telecommunications (TMT) practice commissioned an extensive survey on the evolving role of media in America. This State of the Media Democracy survey offers a generational reality check on the usage of current media platforms/devices and what the future may hold.

Millennials are leading the way, embracing new technologies, games, entertainment platforms, user-generated content and communication tools — creating a “trickle up” effect where the older generations are learning from them. The survey found that despite their eagerness to embrace new media, Millennials have an affinity for “traditional” media, such as print publications and television. Almost six in 10 survey respondents (58 percent) said they use magazines to find out about what's "cool and hip," such as clothes, cars and music. Perhaps more important, almost three-quarters (71 percent) enjoy reading print magazines even though they know they could find most of the same information online.

Some 8 million US kids and teens spent time in virtual worlds on a regular basis last year, according to eMarketer, which expects that figure to grow to 15 million by 2013. The market research firm estimates that 37% of kids 3-11 play in virtual worlds at least once a month, and 54% will by 2013. According to conference organizer Virtual Worlds Management, as of this past January, there were 112 virtual worlds aimed at people under 18, with another 81 in development.

Megan A. Moreno, Dimitri A. Christakis, et al.

Scientists at Seattle Children's Research Institute and the University of Washington randomly selected 500 MySpace profiles belonging to self-described 18-year-olds in the U.S. to determine what sort of information the average teen was sharing online. Their conclusion? The kids are not alright. Well, half of them anyways. Nearly 54% of the selected profiles revealed details about risky sexual lifestyles, drug addictions and violent encounters with peers.

Jaana Juvonen, University of California--Los Angeles

Nearly three in four teenagers say they were bullied online at least once during a recent 12-month period, and only one in 10 reported such cyber-bullying to parents or other adults, according to a new study by UCLA psychologists.

Of those who were bullied online, 85 percent also have been bullied at school, the psychologists found. The probability of getting bullied online was substantially higher for those who have been the victims of school bullying.

"Bullying affects millions of students and is not limited to school grounds," said lead study author Jaana Juvonen, a professor of psychology and chair of UCLA's developmental psychology program. "Bullying on the Internet looks similar to what kids do face-to-face in school. The Internet is not functioning as a separate environment but is connected with the social lives of kids in school. Our findings suggest that especially among heavy users of the Internet, cyber-bullying is a common experience, and the forms of online and in-school bullying are more alike than different."
 
The research is based on an anonymous Web-based survey of 1,454 participants between the ages of 12 and 17, who were recruited through a nationally popular teen website from August through October 2005. The psychologists' findings appear in the September issue of the Journal of School Health.

Forty-one percent of the teenagers surveyed reported between one and three online bullying incidents over the course of a year, 13 percent reported four to six incidents and 19 percent reported seven or more incidents, Juvonen said.

At the same time, nearly two-thirds of teens with profiles (63%) believe that a motivated person could eventually identify them from the information they publicly provide on their profiles.

A new report, based on a survey and a series of focus groups conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project examine how teens, particularly those with profiles online, make decisions about disclosing or shielding personal information.

Some 55% of online teens have profiles and most of them restrict access to their profile in some way. Of those with profiles, 66% say their profile is not visible to all internet users. Of those whose profile can be accessed by anyone online, nearly half (46%) say they give at least some false information. Teens post fake information to protect themselves and also to be playful or silly.Read the full Brief, 04/19/2007

British children's brain development is being threatened by their failure to work with their hands in school and at home, said a report released on Monday.

With woodwork, metalwork, craft, music or car mechanic classes dropped by many schools and children wanting to play computer games at home, the UK is becoming a "software instead of a screwdriver society," said the report, commissioned by the Ruskin Mill Educational Trust.

"Working with one's own hands in a real-world 3-D environment is imperative for full cognitive and intellectual development," said the report's author Dr. Aric Sigman.

"Research is showing that increasing time spent in the virtual world of computers is displacing hands-on play and hands-on learning.

"That allows young people to experience how the world works in practice, to gain an understanding of materials and processes and to make informed judgments about abstract concepts."

The report cited examples of 11-year-olds with deficits in certain areas of their cognitive development and a decline in the ability of young engineers and apprentices to conceptualize straightforward mechanical problems.

"The findings of this report clearly point to strengthening the role of '3-D' learning and crafts in educational policy-making today," said Sigman.

"The implications for the economy are significant and will actually improve the workforce's ability to use computers in research, design and development.

"But parents too have a responsibility to ensure their children have more of a 'hands-on' upbringing."

Sigman also warned class-obsessed Britons needed to drop their snobbish attitude to hands-on vocational training within schools.

"Working with your hands is considered declasse and the sciences are often seen as 'trade,"' said Dr. Sigman.

"Research is showing that increasing time spent in the virtual world of computers is displacing hands-on play and hands-on learning.

"That allows young people to experience how the world works in practice, to gain an understanding of materials and processes and to make informed judgments about abstract concepts."

The report cited examples of 11-year-olds with deficits in certain areas of their cognitive development and a decline in the ability of young engineers and apprentices to conceptualize straightforward mechanical problems. 
 

Amanda Lenhart, Pew and Internet Life Project

According to a study by Pew Internet and American Life Project, 35 percent of US adults who use the Internet have a profile on at least one social network such as Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter. This is a significant increase over just eight percent in 2005, but still a far cry from the 65 percent of US teens aged 17 and younger who use social networks. While adult social network usage doubled in a year to reach 16 percent in 2006, it took another two years to double again around December 2008.

 Janna Quitney Anderson, Elon University; Lee Rainie, Director, Pew Internet & American Life Project

A survey of experts shows they expect major tech advances as the phone becomes a primary device for online access, voice-recognition improves, and the
structure of the Internet itself improves. They disagree about whether this will lead to more social tolerance, more forgiving human relations, or better home lives.

Tracy L.M. Kennedy, University of Toronto; Aaron Smith, Research Specialist, Pew Internet Project; Amy Tracy Wells, Research Fellow, Pew Internet Project; Barry Wellman, University of Toronto

The internet and cell phones have become central components of modern family life. Among all household types, the traditional nuclear family has the highest rate of technology usage and ownership.

A national survey has found that households with a married couple and minor children are more likely than other household types -- such as single adults, homes with unrelated adults, or couples without children to have cell phones and use the internet.

The survey shows that these high rates of technology ownership affect family life. In particular, cell phones allow family members to stay more regularly in touch even when they are not physically together. Moreover, many members of married-with-children households view material online together.

CHICAGO — They think it's pointless, narcissistic. Some don't even know what it is.

Even so, more young adults and teens — normally at the cutting edge of technology — are finally coming around to Twitter, using it for class or work, monitoring the minutiae of celebrities' lives.

It's not always love at first tweet, though. Many of them are doing it grudgingly, perhaps because a friend pressures them or a teacher or boss makes them try the 140-character microblogging site.

 A small U.S. and German study has found that text messaging may help children fight off obesity by taking advantage of the fact that many youngsters are glued to their cell phones.

Researchers from the University of North Carolina and Germany's University of Heidelberg found text messaging could be used to reduce children's chances of becoming overweight or obese later in life by helping them monitor and modify their behavior.

The study, published in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, involved 58 children aged 5 to 13 and their parents who took part in group education sessions to encourage them to increase physical activity, decrease time spent watching television, and cut back on sugar-sweetened drinks.

The participants were divided into three groups -- one that reported self-monitoring via text messaging, another group with a paper monitoring diary, and a no-monitoring control group.

The study found that children in the text messaging group were far more likely to stick to their goals -- 43 percent -- than those with a paper diary -- 19 percent.

Sydney Jones, Research Assistant; Susanna Fox, Associate Director

More teens play online games than visit social networking sites. Also, the number of teens using email has dropped significantly over the past four years.

The new report, Generations Online in 2009, found that despite the commonly held perception that teens live on sites like MySpace and Facebook, 78 percent of teens 12-17 play online games while just 65 percent use social networking sites. Those numbers diverge for the Generation Y found Pew, as just half of adults 18-32 play online games while 67 percent of them are on social networking sites.

Despite the fact that nearly a third of teens are not social networkers, these sites, along with text messaging and instant messaging are quickly shoving aside email as a preferred form of Web communication for this group. Pew’s research found that 73 percent of teens 12-17 use email—still as sizable number--but down considerably from the 89 percent figure recorded in 2005.

According to AdMob, there are many similarities between iPhone and iPod touch users in the US, especially in the demographic makeup of each group in areas such as age and household income. iPhone users are generally older. 69% of iPod touch users are between 13-24 years of age, while this same age segment represents just 26% of iPhone users. 31% of iPhone users are 35-49 years old, while only 12% of iPod touch users fall in this age segment. In total, 74% of iPhone users are over the age of 25, compared to 31% of iPod touch users.

The teen obsession with yakking, text messaging and ring tone swapping on their cell phones might mean more than a whopping phone bill. For the most crazed, it\'s a sign of unhappiness and anxiety, according to a new medical study.

A survey of 575 high school students found that the top third of users -- students who used their phones more than 90 times a day -- frequently did so because they were unhappy or bored. They scored significantly higher on tests measuring depression and anxiety compared with students who used their phones a more sedate 70 times daily.

The study, presented Tuesday at a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in Toronto, is among the first to explore the emotional significance of teens\' cell phone habits as the device becomes more entrenched in today\'s youth culture.

Read the full Brief, 05/24/2006

Nearly one-half of teen mobile phone users in the US said they would be at least somewhat interested in accepting mobile ads, as long as they got something in return, according to a September 2008 study conducted by Harris Interactive for mobile trade group CTIA.

Harris surveyed mobile users ages 13 to 19, and found that more than one-half of respondents were not interested in mobile ads, even in exchange for some type of incentive. Incentives are likely to be part of many mobile ad campaigns, because a majority of users are opposed to mobile marketing in general.

To shed light on how different generations are “consuming” media — and what their future media preferences are likely to be — Deloitte LLP's Technology, Media and Telecommunications (TMT) practice commissioned an extensive survey on the evolving role of media in America. This State of the Media Democracy survey offers a generational reality check on the usage of current media platforms/devices and what the future may hold.

Millennials are leading the way, embracing new technologies, games, entertainment platforms, user-generated content and communication tools — creating a “trickle up” effect where the older generations are learning from them. The survey found that despite their eagerness to embrace new media, Millennials have an affinity for “traditional” media, such as print publications and television. Almost six in 10 survey respondents (58 percent) said they use magazines to find out about what's "cool and hip," such as clothes, cars and music. Perhaps more important, almost three-quarters (71 percent) enjoy reading print magazines even though they know they could find most of the same information online.

Beverly Plester, Clare Wood, Puja Joshi

Text speak (or, rather, TXT SP3EAK) not only doesn't harm literacy in children, researchers have found, but its use is actually positively correlated with their language and reading skills. ... children who use "textisms" on mobile phones tend to have a better grasp of (normal) word reading, vocabulary, and phonological awareness, even when controlled for age, memory, and how long they have owned a phone.

Researchers ... studied the texting behavior of 88 British children between the ages of 10 and 12 and how it related to their school literacy skills. They gave the kids 10 different scenarios and asked them to write text messages to describe each situation; their textisms were split into categories (shortenings, contractions, acronyms, symbols, non-conventional spellings, etc.) and analyzed for their use of language as it compared to their school performance.

"As expected, we found associations between textism use and phonological awareness," wrote the researchers in their report. "What is most important, the extent of the children's textism use was able to predict significant variance in their word reading ability[...] This suggests that children's use of textisms is not only positively associated with word reading ability, but that it may be contributing to reading development in a way that goes beyond simple phonologically based explanations."

Less than one-fifth of people aged 13-17 use e-mail as their primary communication method with friends, compared with nearly 40% of adults aged 25-54. At the same time, more than one-third of online teens rely primarily on instant messaging to communicate with friends while just 11% of adults aged 25-34 favor this method. Read the full Brief, 11/06/2006

The University of Glasgow study, co-written by psychology researcher Markus Bindemann, found children ages 6 to 8 respond to the image of a television as alcoholics do to pictures of an alcoholic drink.

In a series of experiments conducted in primary schools, most youngsters looked at a picture of a blank television screen as soon as it flashed up on a computer next to a smiling face, The Times of London reported. Read the full Brief, 11/07/2006

Nearly half - 46 percent - of US "tweens" (those age 8-12) use a cell phone, and safety is the primary reason that parents cite for their childrens' having a mobile phone, according to Nielsen's newly launched Mobile Kids Insights survey.

The survey also estimates that US tweens - a population segment of 20 million - get their own cell phone between age 10 and 11, on average.
Some 55 percent of tweens who own a cell phone send text messages and 21 percent download ringtones, according to the study.

Mizuko Ito, Heather Horst, Matteo Bittanti, danah boyd, Becky Herr-Stephenson, Patricia G. Lange, C.J. Pascoe, and Laura Robinson with Sonja Baumer, Rachel Cody, Dilan Mahendran, Katynka Martínez, Dan Perkel, Christo Sims, and Lisa Tripp

Digital media and online communication have become pervasive in the lives of youth in the United States. Social network sites, online games, video-sharing sites, and gadgets such as iPods and mobile phones are now fixtures of youth culture. They have so permeated young lives that it is hard to believe that less than a decade ago these technologies had barely registered in the lives of U.S. children and teens. Today’s youth may be coming of age and struggling for autonomy and identity as did their predecessors, but they are doing so amid reconfigured contexts for communication, friendship, play, and self-expression.

We are wary of claims that a digital generation is overthrowing culture and knowledge as we know it and that its members are engaging in new media in ways radically different from those of older generations. At the same time, we also believe that this generation is at a unique historical moment tied to longer-term and systemic changes in sociability and culture. While the pace of technological change may seem dizzying, the underlying practices of sociability, learning, play, and self-expression are undergoing a slower evolution, growing out of resilient social and cultural structures that youth inhabit in diverse ways in their everyday lives. We sought to place both the commonalities and diversity of youth new media practice in the context of this broader social and cultural ecology.

To shed light on how different generations are “consuming” media — and what their future media preferences are likely to be — Deloitte LLP's Technology, Media and Telecommunications (TMT) practice commissioned an extensive survey on the evolving role of media in America. This State of the Media Democracy survey offers a generational reality check on the usage of current media platforms/devices and what the future may hold.

Millennials are leading the way, embracing new technologies, games, entertainment platforms, user-generated content and communication tools — creating a “trickle up” effect where the older generations are learning from them. The survey found that despite their eagerness to embrace new media, Millennials have an affinity for “traditional” media, such as print publications and television. Almost six in 10 survey respondents (58 percent) said they use magazines to find out about what's "cool and hip," such as clothes, cars and music. Perhaps more important, almost three-quarters (71 percent) enjoy reading print magazines even though they know they could find most of the same information online.

Dr. Michele L. Ybarra, Internet Solutions, Santa Ana, Ca.

Young people exposed to violent media are more likely to lash out violently themselves, new research published in Pediatrics shows.

"Our findings add to the growing evidence that violence in the media is related to aggressive behavior, including seriously violent behavior among youths," Dr. Michele L. Ybarra of Internet Solutions for Kids in Santa Ana, California and her colleagues report. "Reduction in youths' exposure to violent media should be viewed as an important aspect of violence prevention."

Many studies have examined exposure to violent media and violent behavior among young people, Ybarra and her team note in their report. In fact, they point out, the American Academy of Pediatrics calls media violence "the single most easily remediable contributing factor" to youth violence.

The researchers examined the relationship between media violence and "seriously violent behavior," defined as shooting or stabbing someone, robbing someone, or committing aggravated assault or sexual assault, in a survey of 1,588 young people 10 to 15 years old. The average age was 13 years old and 48 percent were girls.

Five percent of those surveyed reported having engaged in some type of seriously violent behavior over the past year, while 38 percent said they had visited at least one type of violent Web site. With each additional type of violent Web site a study participant reported viewing, the likelihood of violent behavior increased by 50 percent.

At the same time, children whose parents read to them, take them on outings and just generally pay attention to them are less likely to become bullies, said the report.

Bullying can now be added "to the list of potential negative consequences of excessive television viewing along with obesity, inattention and other types of aggression," said Frederick Zimmerman who led the research.

"Our findings suggest some steps that can be taken with children to potentially help prevent bullying. Maximizing cognitive stimulation and limiting television watching in the early years of development might reduce children\'s subsequent risk of becoming bullies," he added.

Previous research had indicated that emotional support from parents helps young children develop empathy, self-regulation and social skills, making them less likely to be bullies, said the report published in the April issue of the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.

Researchers have also found that early gaps in learning and understanding may make children less competent in dealing with their peers and that violence on television leads to aggressive behavior, it added.

The Washington study reached its conclusions by looking at data from a study of 1,266 four-year-olds whose bullying -- based on assessments from their mothers -- was tracked at ages 6 through 11. Overall, about 13 percent the children turned out to be bullies.

The study also took into account the stimulation the children received as measured by outings, reading, playing and what role the parents played in teaching the children.

Whether the child ate meals with both parents, whether parents talked to the child while working were also measured, along with the average number of hours of television viewed.

--Reuters, April 5, 2005 Read the full Brief, 04/06/2005

Jennifer Aubrey, University of Missouri, Columbia

Guys who check out the sexy female models in so-called lad magazines such as Maxim have more body-image problems than their pals, a new study finds.

While it is fairly well-known that women feel worse about their bodies after viewing other females in Cosmopolitan or Glamour, guys apparently take the same knock after perusing the lingerie-clad women spread across the pages of Maxim, FHM and Stuff.

The researchers say that by looking at idealized, sexualized women, guys feel less-than because they start thinking they need to measure up on the attractiveness scale to snag such a mate.

"Men make the inference that in order to be sexual and romantic with women of the similar caliber they see in Maxim magazine, they also need to be attractive," said lead researcher Jennifer Aubrey of the Department of Communications at the University of Missouri, Columbia.

Jennifer R. Linder, Douglas A. Gentile, Iowa State University

This study had two goals: first, to examine the validity of the television rating system for assessing aggression in programs popular among girls; second, to evaluate the importance of inclusion of non-physical forms of aggression in the ratings system by examining associations between television aggression exposure and behavior. Ninety-nine fifth grade girls listed their favorite programs; 76 programs were coded for total, rewarded, and justified indirect, verbal, and physical aggression. Teachers reported participants' aggressive and prosocial behaviors. Results indicated that the age-based ratings do not reflect the amount of total indirect and verbal aggression in programs, and there were higher levels of physical aggression and justified verbal aggression in children's programs than in programs for general audiences, contrary to hypotheses. The industry violent content ratings identified programs with higher mean levels of physical aggression, but did not distinguish programs that contained violence from those that did not. Exposure to televised physical aggression, verbal aggression, and rewarded indirect aggression was associated with higher child aggression and decreased prosocial behavior. Implications for the validity of the industry ratings are discussed.

PURPOSE: To investigate the possibility that the mass media (television, movies, music, and magazines) serve as a kind of super peer for girls who enter puberty sooner than their age-mates. Multiple studies have demonstrated significant associations between earlier pubertal timing and earlier transition to first sex. Does puberty also stimulate interest in sexual media content that is seen as giving permission to engage in sexual behavior?

METHODS: White and African-American female adolescents (n = 471; average age 13.7 years) recruited from public middle schools in central North Carolina completed two self-administered surveys in their homes about their pubertal status, interest in and exposure to various media, and perceptions of sexual media content.

RESULTS: Earlier maturing girls reported more interest than later maturing girls in seeing sexual content in movies, television, and magazines, and in listening to sexual content in music, regardless of age or race. Earlier maturing girls were also more likely to be listening to music and reading magazines with sexual content, more likely to see R-rated movies, and to interpret the messages they saw in the media as approving of teens having sexual intercourse.

CONCLUSIONS: The mass media may be serving as a kind of sexual super peer, especially for earlier maturing girls. Given the lack of sexual health messages in most media adolescents attend to, these findings give cause for concern. The media should be encouraged to provide more sexually healthy content, and youth service providers and physicians should be aware that earlier maturing girls may be interested in sexual information.Read the full Brief, 05/10/2005

The study found that the more time adolescents spend listening to music with sexually degrading lyrics, the more likely they are to initiate intercourse and other sexual activities. This holds true for boys and girls as well as for whites and nonwhites, even after accounting for a wide range of other personal and social factors associated with adolescent sexual behavior.

Researchers found that only sexually degrading lyrics – many quite graphic and containing numerous obscenities – are related to changes in adolescents\' sexual behavior. These lyrics depict men as sexually insatiable, women as sexual objects, and sexual intercourse as inconsequential. Other songs about sex do not appear to influence youth the same way.

“These portrayals objectify and degrade women in ways that are clear, but they do the same to men by depicting them as sex-driven studs,” said Steven Martino, a RAND psychologist who led the study. “Musicians who use this type of sexual imagery are communicating something very specific about what sexual roles are appropriate, and teen listeners may act on these messages.” Read the full Brief, 08/07/2006

MONDAY, Feb. 5 (HealthDay News) -- More than 40 percent of teens and preteens surveyed say they\'ve recently come across nudity and pornography on the Internet, and most say they weren\'t looking for it, according to a study released today.

Those numbers were highest among older boys: Nearly four in 10 males aged 16-17 said they\'d gone to adult sites on purpose within the past year, compared to just eight percent of girls at the same age.

Still, filtering software seemed to lower the risk that kids would see something inappropriate, and only a small percentage of the children reported being disturbed by what they saw.

"Sometimes it\'s possible for people to overreact" to children\'s exposure to pornography, said study lead author Janis Wolak, a research assistant professor at the University of New Hampshire. "It\'s important to give youth credit. Most kids have a lot of common sense."

Wolak and colleagues launched a three-month telephone survey of 1,422 kids aged 10-17 in March 2005. All the children surveyed were Internet users, and all were interviewed with the consent of their parents.

The findings are published in the February issue of the journal Pediatrics.

Forty-two percent of the kids surveyed said they\'d encountered online pornography -- defined broadly as pictures of naked people or sexual activity -- over the past year. Of those, two-thirds -- about 34 percent of all those interviewed -- said their exposure to the material was unwanted.

By contrast, just 25 percent of all kids interviewed in a 1999-2000 survey said they\'d had unwanted exposure to online pornography.

Read the abstract from PediatricsRead the full Brief, 02/05/2007

WASHINGTON, DC—A report of the American Psychological Association (APA) released today found evidence that the proliferation of sexualized images of girls and young women in advertising, merchandising, and media is harmful to girls’ self-image and healthy development.

To complete the report, the APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls studied published research on the content and effects of virtually every form of media, including television, music videos, music lyrics, magazines, movies, video games and the Internet. They also examined recent advertising campaigns and merchandising of products aimed toward girls.

Sexualization was defined by the task force as occurring when a person’s value comes only from her/his sexual appeal or behavior, to the exclusion of other characteristics, and when a person is sexually objectified, e.g., made into a thing for another’s sexual use.

Examples of the sexualization of girls in all forms of media including visual media and other forms of media such as music lyrics abound. And, according to the report, have likely increased in number as “new media” have been created and access to media has become omnipresent. The influence and attitudes of parents, siblings, and friends can also add to the pressures of sexualization. Read the full Brief, 02/20/2007

Researchers at Indiana University School of Medicine set up two groups each of 14 boys and five girls. In one group all the kids "had a chronic pattern of violent behavior and had been diagnosed with disruptive behavior disorder," while the other group, a control group, was comprised of kids with "no history of behavioral problems." Members of each group had been exposed to different amounts of violence in media in their day-to-day lives over the past year. It was determined that 58% of the aggressive group had high exposure vs. 42% of the non-aggressive control group. The researchers defined violence in media exposure as "the average amount of time per week that the adolescents watched television or played video games depicting human injury". The researchers observed the brain activity of the kids in both groups while they took part in a concentration test and found that the brain activity of non-aggressive kids who were exposed to high levels of violence in media showed similar patterns in the part of the brain that is associated with self-control and attention, as those kids with diagnosed aggression disorders. The results also found that all of the aggressive kids showed reduced brain activity in the self-control/attention area, whether or not they were exposed to a high level of violence in media.

On the flip side those non-aggressive kids showed more brain activity in the self-control/attention area during the concentration test. Researchers say that there needs to be more studies in order to assess if it was indeed the exposure to violence that caused the results. The report appears in the May/June issue of the Journal of Computer Assisted Tomography. Read the full Brief, 06/13/2005

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology, researchers at Michigan State University are able to observe which areas of the brain are stimulated when a subject plays violent video games. Thirteen male volunteers between the ages of 18-26 were observed while they played the mature-rated first-person-shooter video game Tactical Ops: Assault on Terror.

After monitoring the brain activity of the subjects during game play, researchers concluded, "There is a causal link between playing the first-person shooting game in our experiment and brain-activity pattern that are considered as characteristic for aggressive cognitions and affects," said Rene Weber, assistant professor of communication and telecommunication at MSU and a researcher on the project. "There is a neurological link and there is a short-term causal relationship.

"Violent video games frequently have been criticized for enhancing aggressive reactions such as aggressive cognitions, aggressive affects or aggressive behavior. On a neurobiological level we have shown the link exists."

The entire report of the research will appear in the January 2006 edition of Media Psychology. Read the full Brief, 11/01/2005

But flics rated PG-13 may not be suitable for youngsters of any age, suggests a new study.

"Violence permeated nearly 90 percent of the films in this study," says Theresa Webb, a researcher in the department of epidemiology and the Southern California Injury Prevention Research Center at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Health Sciences unit.

"And while the explanations and causes of youth violence are very complex, the evidence is clear that media depictions of violence contribute to the teaching of violence."

This is especially true where the average young person accesses different kinds of visual media for as long as eight hours a day, says Webb.

Borrowing from late communications theorist George Gerbner, happy violence is "cool, swift, and painless," but, "PG-13 films don’t consider the consequences of violent acts, such as injury, death, and the shattered lives of the people involved," says the study.Read the full Brief, 06/11/2007

TUESDAY, Nov. 28 (HealthDay News) -- A study of adolescents finds that violent video games stir up the brain\'s emotional-response center while reducing activity in regions linked to self-control.

"This is the first time that it has been demonstrated that violent video games can affect brain physiology and the way the brain functions," said lead researcher Dr. Vincent Mathews, professor of radiology at Indiana University School of Medicine.

"After playing a violent video game, these adolescents had an increased activity in the amygdala, which is involved in emotional arousal," Mathews said. "At the same time, they had decreases in activity in parts of the brain which are involved in self-control," he added.

The findings were to be presented Tuesday in Chicago at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America.

Much has been made about violent video games and how they impact children over the past decade and legislatures and activist groups alike have tried to find ways to stop them from getting in the hands of minors. And with the help of retailers, most laws have tried to make it impossible for those under the age of 17 to buy an M-rated game. But according to a recent Nielsen survey, 17 percent of Grand Theft Auto IV buyers were underage.

Nielsen found that of the 6,000 respondents, 17 percent of all buyers were younger than 17 -- the children were aged between 6 and 17 -- and of those younger buyers, 61 percent bought the game themselves, while 39 percent had a relative or friend buy it for them. In those cases where someone else bought the game for the kids, 80 percent were the child's parent or guardian and 10 percent said their older siblings bought the game for them.

• Almost all young teens play video games. Just six percent of the sample had not played any electronic games in the previous six months.

• Most 7th and 8th graders (ages 12 to 14) regularly play violent video games. Two-thirds of boys and more than one in four girls reported playing at least one M-rated game "a lot in the past six months."

• A third of boys and one in ten girls play video or computer games almost every day.

• Many children are playing video games to manage their feelings, including anger and stress. Children who play violent games are more likely to play to get their anger out. They are also more likely to play games with strangers on the Internet.

Patrick M. Markey, Kelly Scherera, Department of Psychology, Villanova University

A new study suggests that games that feature motion-controlled violent actions, like the Wii version of Manhunt 2 (above), don't affect players any differently than traditional violent games.

The study was conducted by Dr. Patrick Markey at Villanova University, and examined participants with varying levels of psychoticism, gauging their "hostility and aggressive thoughts" while playing Manhunt 2 or Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2008.

The 118 participants (68 female and 50 male college students) completed a measure of psychoticism before and immediately after playing one of the two games, with either motion controls or standard controls.

Published in Computers in Human Behavior, the study concludes that the use of motion controls did not exacerbate any of the perceived negative effects (aggression, hostility, etc.) that could result from playing violent video games. Swinging a Wiimote or mashing a button generated the same results.

Brian A. Primack, MD, EdM, MS, Erika L. Douglas, MS, Michael J. Fine, MD, MSc, and Madeline A. Dalton, PhD

In an article published in the April 2009 issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, researchers found that teenagers who preferred popular songs with degrading sexual references were more likely to engage in intercourse or in pre-coital activities.

Writing in the article, Brian A. Primack, MD, EdM, MS, Center for Research on Health Care at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, states, "This study demonstrates that, among this sample of young adolescents, high exposure to lyrics describing degrading sex in popular music was independently associated with higher levels of sexual behavior. In fact, exposure to lyrics describing degrading sex was one of the strongest associations with sexual activity...These results provide further support for the need for additional research and educational intervention in this area."

Surveys were completed by 711 ninth-grade students at three large urban high schools. These participants were exposed to over 14 hours each week of lyrics describing degrading sex. About one third had previously been sexually active. Compared to those with the least exposure to lyrics describing degrading sex, those with the most exposure were more than twice as likely to have had sexual intercourse. The relationship between exposure to lyrics describing degrading sex and sexual experience held equally for both young men and women.

Similarly, among those who had not had sexual intercourse, those in the highest third of exposure to lyrics describing degrading sex were nearly twice as likely to have progressed along a noncoital sexual continuum compared to those in the lowest third. Finally, the relationships between exposure to lyrics describing non-degrading sex and sexual outcomes were not significant.

Can video games make kids more violent? A new study employing state-of-the-art brain-scanning technology says that the answer may be yes.

Researchers at the Indiana University School of Medicine say that brain scans of kids who played a violent video game showed an increase in emotional arousal – and a corresponding decrease of activity in brain areas involved in self-control, inhibition and attention.

Does this mean that your teenager will feel an uncontrollable urge to go on a shooting rampage after playing “Call of Duty?”

Vince Mathews, the principal investigator on the study, hesitates to make that leap. But he says he does think that the study should encourage parents to look more closely at the types of games their kids are playing.

“Based on our results, I think parents should be aware of the relationship between violent video-game playing and brain function.”

The Federal Communications Commission report, released Wednesday, promises to kick off a fierce fight on Capitol Hill, one that, like the ongoing battle over indecency, could end up in the Supreme Court.

Citing university and government studies, the FCC concluded that violent programming was harmful to children and said Congress could craft limits that wouldn\'t violate First Amendment rights.

Specifically, the report said, lawmakers have the authority to give the agency the power to restrict when broadcasters can air excessive gore and mayhem. Read the full Brief, 04/26/2007

“Self-regulation, long a critical underpinning of U.S. advertising, is weakened if industry markets products in ways inconsistent with their ratings and parental advisories,” said FTC Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras. “This latest FTC report shows improvement, but also indicates that the entertainment industry has more work to do.”

The report includes results from the FTC’s latest mystery shop where unaccompanied children, ages 13-16, were sent into retailers to make a purchase. The undercover shop found significant improvement by video-game retailers, particularly in national retail chains, but little or no improvement by movie theaters, or DVD and music retailers.Read the full Brief, 04/12/2007

Children who watch a lot of television are more prone to push other kids around, according to the research. Conversely, four-year-olds whose parents tend to read to them, eat meals with them and go on outings together are significantly less likely to become bullies in grade school.

The study followed 1,266 four-year-olds through ages six to 11.

An increase of 3.9 hours of TV per day led to a 25 percent increase in the probability of becoming a bully. And who decides which kids are the roughnecks? Their mothers. About 13 percent of the little ones were so labeled by mom.Read the full Brief, 06/05/2007

Megan A. Moreno, Dimitri A. Christakis, et al.

Scientists at Seattle Children's Research Institute and the University of Washington randomly selected 500 MySpace profiles belonging to self-described 18-year-olds in the U.S. to determine what sort of information the average teen was sharing online. Their conclusion? The kids are not alright. Well, half of them anyways. Nearly 54% of the selected profiles revealed details about risky sexual lifestyles, drug addictions and violent encounters with peers.

Brad Bushman, University of Michigan; Elly Konijn, VU University Amsterdam

The lure of something off-limits only increases demand, a new study says.

In the study, researchers tested 310 Dutch children ranging in age from 7 to 17. Participants read fictitious game descriptions and rated how much or how little they wanted to play each game. In every group, the more objectionable the content, the more kids clamored for the controller—"forbidden fruit," the researchers called the games. The findings are published in the March issue of Pediatrics.

While research has found that ratings increase the attraction to raunchy TV shows and movies, the hypothesis had never been tested with video games ... They suggest that youth should not be allowed to buy their own games, that parents and physicians be aware of risk factors (such as a drop in grades) and that policy-makers rethink the classifications (such as M, appropriate for those 17 and older), which will only make the games "unspeakably desirable."

Film ratings for violence generated by the Motion Picture Association of America are all but meaningless, according to a study released by the School of Public Health at the University of California at Los Angeles.

"The movie industry\'s rating system and its prose explanations frequently hide more offensive elements behind euphemistic and innocuous terminology," said Theresa Webb, a researcher with the Southern California Injury Prevention Research Center within the school. "This makes informed parental choice extremely difficult."

The study, funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found violence in unlikely places, identifying nearly 100 violent acts, for example, in the 1994 film "The Jungle Book," which was rated PG.

"There have been a lot of these studies criticizing the ratings system, yet the system is still very popular," MPAA spokesman John Feehery said yesterday. "We urge filmgoers to use our ratings in conjunction with other sources to determine if a film is suitable."

The voluntary rating system went into effect in 1968, provided by the California-based MPAA and the National Association of Theater Owners. Both maintain that ratings are intended only as guidelines.

The system was revised in 1990 to include descriptive content after being criticized by the Federal Trade Commission and others in recent years as "too lenient" and "misleading." The rating systems now includes G (general audiences), PG (parental guidance suggested; some material may not be suitable for children), PG-13 (parents strongly cautioned; material may be inappropriate for children under 13), R (restricted for those under 17) and NC-17 (no one 17 and under admitted).

Indeed, ratings language is not particularly specific. For example, in PG-rated films, "horror and violence do not exceed moderate levels," according to MPAA guidelines. The UCLA study categorized such language as "vague."

The study\'s research team pored over 98 movies released in 1994 as a representative basis for the analysis, which correlated the degree of violence in each film with its official MPAA rating.

The results? UCLA\'s criteria found that all but three of the films contained at least one incident of bodily harm and that violence was often used as a humorous plot device. A quarter of the violence was classified as "lethal" by researchers.

The three films with the most bodily violence were "Timecop," an R-rated action film, with 110 violent acts; "The Jungle Book," a PG-rated retelling of the classic Rudyard Kipling tale, with 97 violent acts; and "True Lies, an R-rated action movie, with 91 violent acts.

On average, the UCLA study found that among those films flagged by the MPAA for violence rather than language or sexuality, R-rated films contained 62 violent acts, PG-13 averaged 55 acts and PG averaged 56.

The MPAA ratings system provided "little meaningful guidance related to violent content" for parents and filmgoers in general, the analysis stated, adding that MPAA ratings also failed to predict the frequency of violence in each film.

"Parent and other organizations have been calling for meaningful content rather than age-centered ratings for years, and now there is scientific evidence to support that argument," said Lucille Jenkins, director of the study.

Producers themselves are joining the fray. The Walt Disney Internet Group, for example, sponsors a movie review site (www.movies.com) meant to help filmgoers make "informed entertainment decisions." Other sites review movies on Christian-based values.

President Bush recently signed the Family Movie Act into law, which approves new filtering technology that allows parents to skip or mute sections of movies shown at home that contain violence, nudity or questionable language.

The UCLA study is published in the current Pediatrics, a journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

By Jennifer Harper, May 3, 2005 Read the full Brief, 05/03/2005

IN a world with grocery store television screens, digitally delivered movie libraries and cellphone video clips, the average American is exposed to 61 minutes of TV ads and promotions a day.

Some people may think that amount seems excessive. But “people don’t seem to be getting up and running away,” said Jack Wakshlag, chief research officer at Turner Broadcasting.

-Media Life. Read the full Brief, 03/01/2004

The report found that in 2003 and 2004 Hispanic youth 12-20 had exposure to 20% more alcohol ads per capita in English-language magazines versus their non-Hispanic counterparts. Hispanic youth in cities including NY, San Francisco, San Antonio and San Jose were more likely to hear alcohol ads on the radio than youth in those cities in general; specific brands advertised on the radio in these cities are Beck\'s Beer, Coors Beer and Budweiser.

CAMY also found that alcohol ads in 2003 & 2004 ran during 14 of the 15 most popular TV shows among Hispanic\'s 12-20. Though the report does not indicate if alcohol ads were national or local it did point to specific TV shows including Bernie Mac, Fear Factor, Don Francisco Presenta, Cristina and The Simpsons. CAMY is funded by grants from The Pew Charitable Trusts and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to Georgetown University.

-Cynopsis: Kids! 10/28/05 Read the full Brief, 10/28/2005

Packaged Facts projects the kids market will experience substantial growth during the next four years, reaching $21.4 billion in disposable income by 2010. Concurrently, families spend more than $115 billion on kids in key consumer areas, such as food, clothing, personal-care items, entertainment, and reading materials. Almost half of this total, $58.3 billion, is devoted to food expenditures. By Packaged Facts estimates, annual expenditures by families on consumer goods for kids will reach approximately $143 billion by 2010.

Marketing to this big-money demographic can be tricky, however, as each age group has distinct tastes, buying habits, and levels of influence over purchasing decisions—not to mention additional influences, such as race, education level of parents, and household income. Then there are the wider-ranging kid issues that have focused anew the spotlight on the potential business and societal risks related to kid marketing. Read the full Brief, 05/26/2006

Nearly one-half of teen mobile phone users in the US said they would be at least somewhat interested in accepting mobile ads, as long as they got something in return, according to a September 2008 study conducted by Harris Interactive for mobile trade group CTIA.

Harris surveyed mobile users ages 13 to 19, and found that more than one-half of respondents were not interested in mobile ads, even in exchange for some type of incentive. Incentives are likely to be part of many mobile ad campaigns, because a majority of users are opposed to mobile marketing in general.

According to the report, in 2004, children ages two to 11 saw:

• 25,600 total television ads (18,300 were paid ads. Most of the remaining 7,300 were promotions for other television programming; some were public service announcements.)

• 10,700 minutes of televisions ads

• Ads averaging 25 seconds in length

• 2-1/4 hours of ad-supported television a day, or 16 hours per week (Ad-supported television accounted for only 70 percent of their television viewing.)

• Over 50 percent of the ads between 4 p.m. and midnight and less than 5 percent of the ads during Saturday morning between 8 a.m. and noon.

According to the report, promotions for television programming account for 28 percent of all TV ads viewed, while food ads account for 22 percent. Other top categories included screen and audio entertainment and games, toys and hobbies. Children get approximately half of their food advertising and about one-third of their total television advertising exposure from programs in which children are at least 50 percent of the audience.Read the full Brief, 06/01/2007

Harvey Anderson, University of Toronto

Everyone knows what too much television can do to the mind and what too little exercise can do to the body, but a Canadian study has now shown that the boob tube can also lead to an increase in how much we eat.

Studying childhood obesity, University of Toronto nutritionist Harvey Anderson found that kids who watched TV while eating lunch took in 228 extra calories than those who ate without the television on.

"One of Anderson's conclusions is that eating while watching television overrides our ability to know when to stop eating," the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, which funded the study, said on Tuesday.

"In effect, mindless television watching produces mindless eating. ... Anderson has some immediate advice for parents — turn the television off during mealtime."

As the new school year begins, many parents with overweight and obese children are worried about how their kids will be treated by other students on the playground and in the classroom.

Bullying is a major concern among parents with overweight and obese children ages 6 to13, and these parents are much more likely than parents with healthy weight children to rate bullying as a top health issue for kids, according to a report released today by the University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health.

“We found that parents with overweight or obese children actually view bullying as a greater problem than childhood obesity,” says Matthew M. Davis, M.D., M.A.P.P., director of the National Poll on Children’s Health. “Since bullying is known to be a problem for children with increased weight, bullying prevention programs will need to be mindful of obesity as a potential trigger for bullying behavior, and of parents’ concerns surrounding this issue.”

And parents aren’t taking childhood obesity lightly. The National Poll on Children’s Health recently reported that parents across the country now rank childhood obesity as their No. 1 health concern for kids.

While parents are having discussions with their children about limiting junk food, time spent watching TV and videos, and playing computer games, the latest National Poll on Children’s Health report reveals that only about two-thirds of parents with overweight or obese children actually enforce such limits. Regardless, Davis says talking with your child about making healthier diets and increased physical activity is still a very important first step in setting the stage for a healthier lifestyle.

The study of nearly 1,500 8th-to-11th graders also found that boys who watched music videos were at higher risk of developing the emerging male version of body-obsession -- a drive toward lean, hyper-muscular physiques.

The findings break new ground because they show that "it is not how much TV adolescents watch, it is what they watch that is bad for them," according to body-image expert Helga Dittmar, a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Sussex, in England.

"In addition, this study is the first to give insight into several underlying psychological processes explaining how TV has this negative impact," said Dittmar, who was not involved in the research.

The study, conducted by Marika Tiggemann of Flinders University of South Australia in Adelaide, appears in the current issue of the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology.

According to Dittmar, media pressures on young people to look thinner (for girls) or more pumped-up (for boys) have never been stronger.

"The media is getting worse," she said. "There\'s good evidence that the female ideal has become progressively thinner, so that typical female models are now often as much as 20 percent underweight (with 15 percent underweight a diagnostic criterion for anorexia nervosa)."

For boys, she pointed to the increasing bulk of children\'s action figures "that have become more muscular than even extreme bodybuilders."

For years, researchers have studied the effects of television viewing on children\'s body image, but those studies have come up with mixed results.

Tiggemann decided to tackle the problem from a different perspective, looking not only at kids\' total viewing time, but what they watched and their stated reasons for watching.

In her study, Australian junior high and high school students filled out questionnaires detailing their previous week\'s TV viewing, including their motivations for tuning into particular shows. They also filled out standard tests aimed at measuring attitudes toward eating and body image.

Total time spent in front of the TV was not related to an unhealthy body image or attitudes that might heighten risks for eating disorders, Tiggemann reported.

However, "watching soap operas and, to a lesser extent, music videos, were associated with poorer body image," she said. "Although girls [were] worse off in absolute terms," Tiggemann said she saw the "same pattern of relationships for girls and boys."

Why might soap operas and music videos be particularly associated with a drive to extreme thinness or muscularity?

According to Tiggemann, music videos "present ideal styles of \'what\'s cool\' that young people probably want to copy," while daytime and prime-time soaps "don\'t explicitly say people should look a particular way, but they show that being attractive and thin is associated with being rich and high status, etc."

Both of these scenarios are largely divorced from contemporary reality, she added.

Tiggemann noted that Australian soap operas tend to follow the American ideal, focusing on the struggles of the very rich and very thin. In fact, she said, "I think the most popular soap watched by young people is The O.C., and Desperate Housewives by slightly older folks."

The study also found that the reason a teen watched a particular show was very important to whether or not viewing was connected to body-image problems.

Watching TV for sheer entertainment was not related to body insecurity, whereas watching for what Tiggemann called "social learning" -- finding out about trends in behavior or fashion, for example -- was related, as was TV watching aimed at escapism or forgetting the day\'s troubles.

The Australian researcher said it\'s difficult to tease out a cause-and-effect relationship from these findings, because kids with body-image issues may simply be drawn to watching soap operas or music videos. "Most likely the influence goes both ways," she said.

Dittmar said the findings reflect the continuing power of media, especially American media, to influence lives.

"For example, in Fiji -- which had a full-bodied ideal for women -- girls quickly adopted the thin ideal after American TV was introduced," she added.

Of course, the vast majority of girls will not go on to become anorexic or bulimic, and most boys will not take dangerous steroids to build muscle. But Tiggemann believes television has the power to trigger insecurity and anxiety in everyone.

"Most people are perfectly healthy but cannot look like the TV stars without doing something unhealthy," she said. "As I see it, a whole heap of people are unnecessarily miserable about this and waste energy on something that is trumped up [by the media]. Here I\'m talking about everygirl, everywoman."

Dittmar agreed, adding that the time to attack this problem is when children are young. "Not just parents, but educational programs in school, could help children and adolescents develop a more critical view of these ideals, and particularly mistaken beliefs linked with \'beauty\' -- that it will make you happier and more successful," she said.

By E.J. Mundell

More information:

To learn about a serious psychological condition called body dysmorphic disorder, head to the American Academy of Family Physicians.Read the full Brief, 06/20/2005

MONDAY, Dec. 4 (HealthDay News) -- Children and adolescents are being bombarded by so many ads that medical experts now fear for their health. Some 40,000 ads a year from television alone may be boosting obesity, poor nutrition and cigarette and alcohol use among U.S. youth, according to a revised statement from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).

The statement, which appears in the December issue of Pediatrics, calls for more media education to counter some of advertising\'s negative effects.

"We\'re pleading with pediatricians and parents to become aware that consumeristic tendencies are being fed right from birth," said Dr. Donald Shifrin, chairman of the AAP Committee on Communications, which issued the statement, and a pediatrician in private practice in Seattle. "We have to understand that youngsters under a certain age cannot differentiate between a commercial and a program. To them, it\'s real. There should be some effort on the part of parents to point out that this is a commercial."

Researchers from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health examined the prevalence of abnormally high blood sugar levels after several hours without eating, a condition called impaired fasting glucose, or IFG, that is measured in a blood test.

One in 14 boys and girls in a nationally representative sample had the condition. Among the overweight adolescents, it was one in six.

Affected adolescents were more likely than those with normal fasting glucose measurements to have other symptoms suggesting they might be on the road to heart problems: Average levels of bad cholesterol and blood fats called triglycerides were higher in youngsters who had the pre-diabetic condition.

“The numbers are definitely concerning,” said co-author Dr. Venkat Narayan, a CDC diabetes researcher.

The study appears in November’s Pediatrics, being published Monday. It is based on data involving 915 youngsters who participated in a 1999-2000 national health survey. Narayan said the researchers will examine whether rates of pre-diabetes have increased since then.

About 20 million Americans have diabetes, most of them adults with type 2 diabetes, which impairs the body’s ability to properly use the blood sugar-regulating hormone insulin. This form of the disease is strongly linked to being overweight and inactive.

More Type 2 diabetes among youths.

Of the roughly 177,000 Americans under age 20 with diabetes, most have type 1, or juvenile onset diabetes, in which the body produces little or no insulin. But type 2 diabetes among youngsters has increased.

Dr. Francine Kaufman, head of the diabetes center at Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles, said about 25 percent of the diabetic children treated there have type 2 diabetes, compared with just 4 percent a decade ago.

Both types involve abnormally high blood sugar levels that can damage blood vessels, the heart and other organs.

For the study, the researchers used American Diabetes Association criteria that defines impaired fasting glucose as blood sugar levels of at least 100 milligrams per deciliter; above 125 is considered diabetes.

The average level was 89.7, within the normal range, but 7 percent of the children in the study were in the pre-diabetic range, translating to about 2 million U.S. youngsters. Roughly 16 percent of the youngsters studied were obese, about the same as recent national estimates.

‘Lifestyle interventions’

Elevated fasting glucose “has no symptoms but it signifies an advanced metabolic problem, which will in most cases progress to type 2 diabetes over time,” said Dr. David Ludwig, director of the obesity program at Children’s Hospital in Boston, who was not involved in the study.

“Intensive lifestyle interventions” including physical activity and improving diet can help prevent pre-diabetes from progressing in adults and it’s likely the same can happen in children, the researchers said.

Ludwig said systematic societal changes are needed, too, including more healthful school lunches. “It’s just not enough to tell people to exercise and eat right,” he said.

-Associated Press, 11/7/05 Read the full Brief, 11/07/2005

See Jane seeks to engage professionals and parents in a call to dramatically increase the percentages of female characters -- and to reduce gender stereotyping -- in media made for children 0-11. See Jane founder, Academy Award winner Geena Davis, says, "By making it common for our youngest children to see everywhere a balance of active and complex male and female characters, girls and boys will grow up to empathize with and care more about each others\' stories."

In collaboration with Ms. Davis and an Advisory Board of media professionals and educators, the project is administered by the respected national non-profit Dads and Daughters, whose advocacy has changed public policy and corporate marketing. Research, education, activism and collaboration are the project\'s hallmarks as we work hand-in-hand with professionals to improve our children\'s earliest media exposure from the inside out.

Read the full Brief, 03/23/2006

The study, described as the first national look at the influence of movie smoking on youths, urged Hollywood to cut back on depictions of smoking or shots of cigarette brands.

The industry also should consider adding a mention of smoking to movie rating data that now mention explicit sex, violence and profanity, it said.

Researchers at Dartmouth Medical School asked 6,522 children aged 10 to 14 to identify films they had seen from a list of 50 randomly selected box office hits released in the United States from 1998 to 2000.

Even after considering other factors known to influence smoking, the study found that adolescents with the highest exposure to movie smoking were 2.6 times more likely to try it compared to those with the lowest exposure.

Of every 100 adolescents who tried smoking, 38 did so because they saw smoking portrayed in movies, said the report published in the November issue of Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

In the entire sample, about 10 percent had tried smoking, according to the study paid for by the National Cancer Institute.

"Part of the reason that exposure to movie smoking has such a considerable impact on adolescent smoking is because it is a very strong social influence on kids ages 10-14," said James Sargent, a pediatrics professor at the school and lead author of the study.

"Because movie exposure to smoking is so pervasive, its impact on this age group outweighs whether peers or parents smoke or whether the child is involved in other activities, like sports," he added.

The authors said their research confirms findings published last year based on a study of teens living primarily in rural areas of New England.

"This is an extremely powerful confirmatory study that shows that kids react the same way to the movies in other places in the United States as they do in New England," said Sargent. "It means that no child is immune to the influence of smoking in movies."

A U.S. government survey released in March showed 22.3 percent of high school students and 8.1 percent of middle school students said they smoked cigarettes in 2004.

By Michael ConlonRead the full Brief, 11/07/2005

By the time they reach the age of 3, more than one-third of low-income urban children are already overweight or obese, according to a study released yesterday that provides alarming evidence that the nation\'s battle of the bulge begins when toddlers are barely out of diapers.

Researchers armed with scales and measuring devices visited nearly 2,000 families in 20 US cities, including Boston, and evaluated the weight and height of 3-year-olds in an unprecedented effort to focus on obesity among the nation\'s most vulnerable children.

Their finding: 35 percent of the low-income 3-year-olds were overweight or obese, a result more than twice the national rate for obesity among preschool children of all income levels and racial groups. Low-income Hispanic children, the researchers reported in the on line version of the American Journal of Public Health , were the most likely of all to have a weight problem, with 44 percent of those toddlers overweight or obese. Read the full Brief, 01/02/2007

Supports studies finding relationship between high video game play and ADD

AMES, Iowa – Parents have long lectured their children about the mind-numbing effects of playing video games all day. And a new Iowa State University study has found that high volume action video game players -- those who play around 40 hours per week -- actually had more difficulty keeping focused on tasks requiring longer, more proactive attention than those who played video games less than a couple of hours a week.

The study, published online last week in the latest issue of the professional journal Psychophysiology, also supports research published within the last year establishing a positive association between being addicted to playing video games and having Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD).

Alison McManus, University of Hong Kong; Robin R. Mellecker, University of Hong Kong

Children love playing video games, and playing active versions of these games may help stop children from becoming obese, University of Hong Kong researchers report.

In fact, children playing active video games have higher heart rates and burn four times as many calories a minute than children playing passive video games, according to this new study.

"Technological change in our homes, schools and workplaces has meant the amount of walking we do has declined significantly, and in its place, disproportionately greater amounts of time are spent seated," said lead researcher Alison M. McManus, from the university's Institute of Human Performance. "With childhood obesity posing the largest international health riddle, converting seated activities into active ones is an important goal."

Parents need to be creative in their endeavors to get children active, McManus said. Children play video games, because it is fun, exciting and challenging, but it is largely conducted seated, she added.

Among the many digital marketing examples cited in the 98-page report are the following:

• To “create a compelling way to connect with the younger demographic,” 600 McDonald’s restaurants in California launched a mobile marketing campaign, urging young cell phone users to text-message to a special phone number to receive an instant electronic coupon for a free McFlurry dessert.

• Coca-Cola’s “My Coke Rewards” program offers special codes in its products that enable young people to access a website, where they can earn such rewards as downloadable ring tones and “amazing sports and entertainment experiences.” This technique is part of a strategy for behavioral profiling, where marketers compile a detailed profile of each customer, including demographic data, purchasing behavior, responses to advertising messages, and even the extent and nature of social networks.

• Food marketers are commercializing online communities by aggressively moving into MySpace and other social networking sites. One technique is to create “branded profiles” that invite children and teens to become “friends” with popular spokescharacters. “Welcome to the King’s Court,” beckons the Burger King MySpace profile. “The virtual home of the Burger King. He’s giving away free episodes of the Fox shows ‘24,’ ‘Pinks,’ and ‘First Friend.’

The study, Food for Thought: Television Food Advertising to Children in the United States, combines content analysis of TV ads with detailed data about children’s viewing habits, to provide an estimate of the number and type of TV ads seen by children of various ages. The study found that tweens ages 8-12 see the most food ads on TV, an average of 21 ads a day, or more than 7,600 a year. Teenagers see slightly fewer ads, at 17 a day, for a total of more than 6,000 a year. For a variety of reasons -- because they watch less TV overall, and more of their viewing is on networks that have limited or no advertising, such as PBS and Disney -- children ages 2-7 see the least number of food ads, at 12 food ads a day, or 4,400 a year.

For each age group studied, food was the top product seen advertised. Thirty-two percent of all ads seen by 2-7 year olds were for food, while 25% of ads seen by 8-12 year olds and 22% of ads seen by 13-17 year olds were for food. Of all genres on TV, shows specifically designed for children under 12 have the highest proportion of food advertising (50% of all ad time).Read the full Brief, 03/28/2007

Jennifer Aubrey, University of Missouri, Columbia

Guys who check out the sexy female models in so-called lad magazines such as Maxim have more body-image problems than their pals, a new study finds.

While it is fairly well-known that women feel worse about their bodies after viewing other females in Cosmopolitan or Glamour, guys apparently take the same knock after perusing the lingerie-clad women spread across the pages of Maxim, FHM and Stuff.

The researchers say that by looking at idealized, sexualized women, guys feel less-than because they start thinking they need to measure up on the attractiveness scale to snag such a mate.

"Men make the inference that in order to be sexual and romantic with women of the similar caliber they see in Maxim magazine, they also need to be attractive," said lead researcher Jennifer Aubrey of the Department of Communications at the University of Missouri, Columbia.

A new study published in the January issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association surveyed more than 8,000 children between kindergarten and third grade to identify factors associated with the children\'s weight.

The researchers classified the children into one of three groups: those who were not overweight in kindergarten and first grade, but were overweight by third grade; those who became overweight during kindergarten and remained overweight through third grade; and those who were never overweight.

The researchers found that the children who watched more television and ate fewer family meals were more likely to be overweight by first grade. Those who watched more television, ate fewer family meals and lived in neighborhoods perceived by their parents as less safe for outdoor play were more likely to be overweight from kindergarten on. Read the full Brief, 01/12/2007

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — For young Americans, the “food landscape” in television advertising is packed with junk food, according to a new study.

The study by researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is the first to explore the nutritional composition of foods advertised to children using Nutrition Facts labeling.

Nutrient-poor high-sugar foods – candy, sweets and soft drinks – dominate (nearly 44 percent) the foods advertised during the TV programs children ages 6 to 11 watch most, the analysis found. Convenience/fast foods made up 34.2 percent of the advertisements during the programs.

There are not yet any recommended daily values (RDVs) for sugar, but these two groups of foods “exceed the RDVs of fat, saturated fat and sodium, and fail to provide the RDVs of fiber and certain vitamins and minerals,” said Kristen Harrison, the lead author of the study.

A 2,000-calorie-a-day diet of foods in the child-audience ads “would exceed the RDV for sodium and provide nearly a cup of sugar,” said Harrison, a professor of speech communication at Illinois and an expert on media effects on children and adolescents.

“How many kids actually eat a diet like that, I can’t say,” she said. “But it’s important to note that this is the nutritional composition of the diet being marketed to kids and their families, and research shows that the more they are exposed to such advertising, the more likely they are to buy the advertised foods. So, heavy TV viewers probably follow a diet more similar to the TV-advertised diet than do lighter viewers.”

Given the food industry’s heavy marketing of convenience/fast foods and other refined, high-calorie products, Harrison said, “It is becoming increasingly difficult for parents to maintain the moderation necessary to preserve their children’s health.”

Findings of the study appear in the September issue of the American Journal of Public Health in an article titled “Nutritional Content of Foods Advertised During the Television Programs Children Watch Most.” Harrison’s co-author was Amy Marske, a graduate student at the time of the study and now a high school teacher in Chicago.

Other findings:

• Snack-time eating in TV advertising is depicted more often than breakfast, lunch and dinner combined. More than half of all eating is depicted in locations “rarely associated with mealtime eating” such as in cars or outdoors.

• Junk-food ads dominated, with far fewer ads for breads and cereals. The ads offered “little representation” of fruits and vegetables, dairy foods, meats, poultry and fish.

• Child actors’ body size was unrelated to their eating behavior, “suggesting, erroneously, that eating and body weight are not related,” Harrison said.

• Most ads featured no health-related messages. Of the few that did, the most common message was that advertised foods contained “some natural ingredients.”

Harrison and Marske also evaluated the nutritional content of food advertised to adults during the most popular TV shows. They found that those ads were dominated (57.1 percent) by convenience/fast foods, fat and sodium.

“An individual eating a 2,000-calorie diet composed of the general-audience foods would consume considerably more than the RDVs of fat, saturated fat and sodium, while ingesting only a fraction of the RDVs of fiber, vitamin C, calcium and iron.”

Harrison said kids’ consumption of TV ads that tout poor food choices is especially troubling because childhood obesity is on the rise, TV advertising influences children’s food purchases and purchase requests, and kids see so many TV food ads a day.

Harrison and Marske tallied an average of 10.65 food advertisements per hour in their sample. Other research has found that preteens watch on average nearly three hours of television a day, meaning that “the typical child aged 6-11 years would be exposed to approximately 11,000 food advertisements each year.”

The researchers taped 40 hours of TV programming that aired in north-central Illinois between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m. for five weeks. Programs were rated most popular nationwide among viewers aged 6-11 years according to Nielsen Media Research.

The sample consisted of the 10 most-viewed hours from each of four sources: cable programs such as SpongeBob SquarePants; Saturday network programs such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles; syndicated programs such as Everybody Loves Raymond; and network primetime programs such as American Idol.

The sample yielded 1,424 advertisements, 426 (or 29.9 percent) of them for food products.

The researchers then coded each ad as being aimed at a child or an adult audience; foods by type; verbal or visual health-related messages; and characteristics of all human characters.

The second part of the analysis focused on the nutritional breakdown of the advertised foods using data obtained from Nutrition Facts labels.

Heavily advertised foods included Burger King Kids Meal chicken tenders, Jell-O Pudding Bites (chocolate and vanilla), McDonald’s Happy Meal french fries, Post Fruity Pebbles cereal and Wendy’s Kid’s Meal crispy chicken nuggets.

Despite the heavy marketing of such foods, Harrison and her co-author say “parental involvement is the most important factor in the determination of the family diet.”

“Parents can work to maintain the integrity of the family pantry not only through selective shopping, but also through efforts to instruct their children about food and nutrition.”

Also, because research demonstrates a connection between TV viewing and obesity for children and adults alike, parents could curb eating in their household by limiting their children’s – and their own – television viewing.

Other adults should join parents in the “food fight” to combat childhood obesity, Harrison said. The food industry and advertisers, for example, “bear some responsibility for peddling nutritionally inadequate foods so aggressively to kids.”

“Also, the continued investment of the medical and public health communities will be needed if parents are to be successful in helping their children resist the influence of commercial food advertising.”

-By Andrea Lynn, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Read the full Brief, 08/24/2005

The global childhood obesity epidemic is focusing attention on the effects of food and beverage marketing. A recent report published by the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations concluded that marketing of energy-dense foods and fast food outlets is a "probable" cause of increasing overweight and obesity among the world\'s children.Read the full Brief, 08/01/2007

Brian A. Primack, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine

Teens who spend long hours watching television are at higher risk for depression as adults, a new study finds.

Participants faced significantly greater odds of being depressed seven years later, and the risk rose with each hour of daily television viewed, according to a report involving more than 4,000 teenagers.

The same association was found for exposure to other electronic media, the researchers noted.

The more than 4,100 adolescents in the study were first asked in 1995 about the number of hours they had spent the previous week watching television or videocassettes, playing computer games, or listening to the radio. They reported an average daily exposure of about 5.7 hours, including 2.3 hours of television viewing.

Seven years later, at an average age of almost 22, 308 (7.4 percent) of the young people had developed symptoms consistent with depression. The incidence of those symptoms was directly related with the number of hours of exposure to television and other electronic media reported at the start of the study, the researchers noted.
 

Watching too much television as a child may trigger serious health problems such as autism and obesity, and in girls the early onset of puberty, a scientist has claimed.

So great are the dangers, says Aric Sigman, that watching television should be banned for children under three years old and severely restricted as they grow older.

Writing in the journal Biologist, Dr Sigman says that the average six-year-old child in Britain will have already spent a year watching television, and claims that the simple act of staring at a bright television screen, regardless of a programme’s content, can damage a child’s health.

Dr Sigman identified 15 negative effects that, he says, television can have on youngsters, ranging from short-sightedness and diabetes to premature puberty and autism.

“We may ultimately be responsible for the greatest health scandal of our time,” he writes. “Given the evidence, it would be prudent to cordon off the early years of child development as a time when screen media is excluded and then introduced judiciously as the child matures. Read the full Brief, 02/20/2007

Youngsters who report teasing, rejection, bullying and other types of abuse because of their weight are two to three times more likely to report suicidal thoughts as well as to suffer from other health issues such as high blood pressure and eating disorders, researchers said. Read the full Brief, 07/12/2007

(INDIANAPOLIS) — The nation\'s schools, under fire for unhealthy school lunches, well-stocked vending machines and phys ed cuts, may actually do a better job than parents in keeping children fit and trim. A study found that 5- and 6-year-olds gained more weight over the summer than during the school year, casting doubt on the assumption that kids are more active during summer vacation.

The findings don\'t reveal what\'s behind the out-of-school weight gain, but the researchers speculate it\'s because the summer months lack the structure of the school year with all its activities and daily comings and goings.

Doug Downey, an Ohio State University sociologist who co-authored the study, said that for many youngsters, the lazy days of summer may offer plenty of free time to eat snacks and lounge about watching TV or playing video games.

He said the study seems to point to the need for parents to be more involved, as well as raising the idea of a longer school year and more after-school programs to keep children active.

And schools should continue their efforts to promote good health, he said.

"Trying to improve the quality of school lunches, getting the soda machines out of schools _ those are still good approaches. But clearly the source of children\'s obesity problems lie outside of the school," Downey said.

Read the full Brief, 02/28/2007

A survey of young people aged 15 to 26 found that for each additional alcohol advertisement viewed per month, there followed a 1 percent rise in the average number of drinks consumed, said study author Leslie Snyder of the University of Connecticut in Storrs.

The study\'s findings counter industry arguments that only adult drinkers heed alcohol advertising, Snyder wrote in the journal Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.

In the study -- released around the New Year\'s holiday that is often associated with toasts and excessive imbibing -- the researchers conducted four rounds of interviews between 1999 and 2001 with a group of young people, with the initial 1,872 subjects selected randomly.

Another finding was that for each additional dollar spent per capita on alcohol advertising in a particular media market, study participants drank 3 percent more per month.

In markets with heavy alcohol advertising of more than $10 per capita per month, alcohol consumption increased over time and reached a peak of 50 drinks per month by age 25.

The study measured advertising exposure on each of four media: television, radio, magazines and billboards.

"The results also contradict claims that advertising is unrelated to youth drinking amounts: that advertising at best causes brand switching, only affects those older than the legal drinking age or is effectively countered by current educational efforts," Snyder wrote.

In an editorial in the journal, David Jernigan of Georgetown University in Washington said the study was the first of its kind to link young people\'s alcohol use directly to objective measures of industry spending on advertising.

The study "calls into question the industry\'s argument that its roughly $1.8 billion in measured media expenditures per year have no impact on underage drinking," he wrote.

Snyder doubted whether the industry was heeding voluntary guidelines that 70 percent of the audience for its advertising be at least 21 years old, the legal drinking age.

--Reuters Monday, January 2, 2006 Read the full Brief, 01/05/2006

 A small U.S. and German study has found that text messaging may help children fight off obesity by taking advantage of the fact that many youngsters are glued to their cell phones.

Researchers from the University of North Carolina and Germany's University of Heidelberg found text messaging could be used to reduce children's chances of becoming overweight or obese later in life by helping them monitor and modify their behavior.

The study, published in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, involved 58 children aged 5 to 13 and their parents who took part in group education sessions to encourage them to increase physical activity, decrease time spent watching television, and cut back on sugar-sweetened drinks.

The participants were divided into three groups -- one that reported self-monitoring via text messaging, another group with a paper monitoring diary, and a no-monitoring control group.

The study found that children in the text messaging group were far more likely to stick to their goals -- 43 percent -- than those with a paper diary -- 19 percent.

ORLANDO, Fla., Feb. 28 – The more a 3-year-old watches television, the more he or she consumes sugary drinks and extra calories, Harvard researchers said today at the American Heart Association’s 47th Annual Conference on Cardiovascular Disease Epidemiology and Prevention.

“For every one-hour increase in TV viewing per day, we found higher intakes of sugar-sweetened beverages including juice (one extra serving per week) and total calories (46.3 more kcal/day),” said Sonia Miller, B.A., lead author of the study and a student at the Harvard Medical School.

Miller and her colleagues based their research on questionnaires from mothers of 1,203 children enrolled at birth in Project Viva, a study of childhood nutrition in Massachusetts funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Just as more TV watching was associated with increased intakes of less healthful foods and nutrients, the researchers said it was also associated with decreased intakes of more healthful foods and nutrients, including fruits and vegetables, calcium and dietary fiber.

“Although 46 calories a day doesn’t sound like much, it can make a difference in weight over time,” said Matthew Gillman, M.D., S.M., senior author and associate professor of ambulatory care and prevention and director of the Obesity Prevention Program for Harvard Medical School and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care.

“Studies estimate that you can explain the amount of excess weight gain in the U.S. adolescent population over the past 10 years or so with the addition of only 150 calories a day. If this “energy gap” also applies to younger children, then each hour of daily TV or video watching could explain about 1/3 of that increase,” Gillman said. Read the full Brief, 03/01/2007

Certain types of video games can have beneficial effects, improving gamers' dexterity as well as their ability to problem-solve – attributes that have proven useful not only to students but to surgeons, according to research recently discussed at the Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association.

In one paper, Fordham University psychologist Fran C. Blumberg, PhD, and Sabrina S. Ismailer, MSED, examined 122 fifth-, sixth- and seventh-graders' problem-solving behavior while playing a video game that they had never seen before to show that playing video games can improve cognitive and perceptual skills.

In a second paper, Iowa State University psychologist Douglas Gentile, PhD, and William Stone, BS, described several studies involving high school and college students and laparoscopic surgeons that looked at their video game usage and its effects.

Other studies involving students showed that those who played more entertainment games did poorer in school and were at greater risk for obesity.

Shin-Yi Chou,  Lehigh College; Inas Rashad, Georgia State University; Michael Grossman, City University of New York

Banning fast food advertisements from children’s television programs would reduce the number of overweight children in the U.S. by 18 percent and decrease the number of overweight teens by 14 percent, economists have estimated in a new study.

The researchers used several statistical models to link obesity rates to the amount of time spent viewing fast food advertising, finding that viewing more fast food commercials on television raises the risk of obesity in children. The study appears in this month’s issue of The Journal of Law and Economics.

“There is not a lot of evidence that overweight kids are more likely to watch TV than other kids,” said Michael Grossman, professor of economics at the City University of New York. “We’re arguing the causality is how many messages are aired -- seeing more of these messages is leading people to put on weight.”

Although adults may not notice Hollywood`s culture of drinking, a new study suggests it may be going right to the heads of adolescent movie watchers, causing them to try alcohol as early as 12 years old.

\'When kids start a behavior, part of the reason is it`s a result of seeing people model (that behavior) in the environment,\' said James D. Sargent, a professor of pediatrics at Dartmouth Medical School and the study`s lead author. \'Now, we`ve extended the environment to include friends, parents and personas we get to know through the movies.\'

The study, published in the new Journal of Studies on Alcohol, is the first evidence of a connection between exposure to alcohol in movies and early onset teen drinking.

In 1999 Sargent and colleagues surveyed more than 5,000 students between the ages of 10 to 14, asking them the number of movies they watch regularly and if they experimented with drinking. The students were then asked whether they had seen any of a random list of 50 movies, selected from a bank of 600 contemporary and popular films. Researchers also noted other factors such as class performance, gender and personality.

In 2001 researchers re-interviewed the children who had reported not drinking at the start of the study and found that those children highly exposed to alcohol in movies were more likely to drink earlier. For example, of the initial non-drinkers, nearly 15 percent had tried alcohol.

The average child was exposed to at least eight hours of alcohol use from the sample of 600 movies.

Nearly all the movies sampled, 92 percent, depicted alcohol use of some kind, Sargent found. Only one-third of the films discouraged drinking as dangerous; in 43 percent of the films, drinking was portrayed as a positive experience.

Sargent described a scene of drunken revelry at a wedding reception in the 2005 movie \'Wedding Crashers\' as typical of wild party plots in films.

\'It`s pervasive,\' said Sargent, who has studied the effect of media on youths for 10 years. \'Once you start paying attention to it, almost anytime a man and woman socialize, they socialize over a drink. Bar scenes and party scenes are frequent.\'

The link between cigarette smoking in movies and teen smoking is already established, so Sargent expected to see this connection between drinking and movies. Kids also begin to smoke and drink at the same age, between 10 and 15. Around 40 percent of 14-year-olds drink, Sargent said, although that number does not seem to be rising.

Although adolescents are often wary of advertisements, they may not recognize that movies are working in a similar, yet subtler, fashion. People put their guards down when watching movies, Sargent said, by keeping their senses open and letting the movie wash over them.

\'I don`t think (kids) approach the viewing of movies with the same skepticism -- it`s just a sensory experience, and those kind of messages are easier to click,\' Sargent said.

So, what`s a parent to do? Monitor the media children access, he said. That can mean controlling what programs kids can watch on TV with a V-chip. The V-chip, a federally mandated device in TVs with larger than 13-inch screens, allows parents to assess rated programs and then block particular shows inappropriate for children. Sargent also suggested limiting children to one movie a week and barring films rated R. On average, kids already spend five to seven hours a day consuming some form of media, the study pointed out.

But with the proliferation of so many forms of media, and with the busy 9-to-5 lifestyle of many households, parents may have a tougher time keeping track of what their children are up to.

\'The sense I get from parents is they are just overwhelmed,\' Sargent said. \'Lots of times their kids know more about the TV than they do.\'

--M&C News, January 19, 2006Read the full Brief, 01/19/2006

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Childhood obesity in the United States appears to be causing girls to reach puberty at an earlier age, for reasons that are not clear, a study said on Monday.

The report from the University of Michigan\'s Mott Children\'s Hospital said a multiyear study following a group of 354 girls found that those who were fatter at age 3 and who gained weight during the next three years reached puberty, as defined by breast development, by age 9.

"Our finding that increased body fatness is associated with the earlier onset of puberty provides additional evidence that growing rates of obesity among children in this country may be contributing to the trend of early maturation in girls," said Dr. Joyce Lee, the lead author.

"Previous studies had found that girls who have earlier puberty tend to have higher body mass index, but it was unclear whether puberty led to the weight gain or weight gain led to the earlier onset of puberty," she added.

"Our study offers evidence that it is the latter," Lee said.

Read the abstractRead the full Brief, 03/05/2007

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Nearly half of all U.S. high-school students admit to recently drinking alcohol illegally, and most of them were binge drinkers, according to a government survey published on Tuesday.

These binge drinkers -- who had five or more drinks in a row -- were more likely to have sex, fight, smoke or use drugs, the study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found.

"Our study clearly shows that it\'s not just that students drink alcohol, but how much they drink that most strongly affects whether they experience other health and social problems," said Dr. Jacqueline Miller of the CDC\'s Alcohol Team, who led the study.

"It also underscores the importance of implementing effective strategies to prevent underage and binge drinking, such as enforcing the minimum legal drinking age and reducing alcohol marketing to youth, which can help us change social norms regarding the acceptability of underage and binge drinking." Read the full Brief, 01/02/2007

But among black boys, the researchers found, there was no connection between body image and self-esteem. This could be because these young men have a unique resilience to the “toxic” stream of media images emphasizing the importance of personal appearance, or it may be that such messages simply don’t target them, lead researcher Dr. Eliana Miller Perrin of the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, Chapel Hill told Reuters Health.

“If they represent a group that doesn’t show this connection between body-esteem and self-esteem, it may be quite interesting to do more research looking at their attitudes about their bodies and their self-esteem,” Perrin added, noting that black male adolescents are a traditionally understudied group.Read the full Brief, 05/11/2007

A study of more than 10,000 people found that the risk of becoming an obese adult increased by seven per cent for every hour of TV watched at weekends at the age of five. Read the full Brief, 05/02/2006

The findings, based on a study of children with Type 1 diabetes, lend support to the American Academy of Pediatrics’ advice that children watch no more than two hours of TV daily, said lead author Dr. Hanna Margeirsdottir of the University of Oslo.

Type 1 diabetes is the less common form of the disease and used to be called juvenile diabetes. It is not related to obesity and is caused when the body cannot make insulin, which converts sugar from food into energy. People with Type 1 must take insulin daily and regulate their blood-sugar levels.

Snacking and overeating can increase blood-sugar levels; physical activity can lower them. While TV-viewing is often accompanied by snacking, the researchers didn’t examine diet or physical activity.

The study results “suggest that encouraging children with Type 1 diabetes to watch less television may be important for improved blood glucose control and better health outcomes,” the study authors wrote.Read the full Brief, 05/25/2007

The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop released a report yesterday that specifies how increased national investment in research-based digital games can play a cost-effective and transformative role. The report Game Changer: Investing in Digital Play to Advance Children’s Learning and Health provides recommendations for the media industry, government, philanthropy and academia to harness the appeal of digital games to improve children’s health and learning.

Surveys were completed by 2761 adults with children ages 1 through 5 years-old. The study also determines whether demographic factors such as race/ethnicity and educational attainment are related to the amount of time preschool children viewed TV/video.

The association between TV viewing and overweight risk calls for needed attention in limiting TV/video viewing and keeping the TV out of the bedroom. Read the full Brief, 06/01/2004

Public Health and safety officials have become alarmed by the newest entry into the world of alcoholic beverages. Alcoholic energy drinks are prepackaged beverages that contain not only alcohol but also caffeine and other stimulants. Earlier this year, 29 state attorneys general signed a letter to Anheuser-Busch expressing their concern about Spykes, an alcoholic energy drink packaged in colorful 2-ounce bottles with obvious appeal to youth. The objections of law enforcement officials as well as parents and leading public health organizations caused Anheuser-Busch to pull Spykes from the market. But the story does not end there. Many alcoholic drinks are still on the market.Read the full Brief, 07/01/2007

Brian Primack, M.D., Ed.M., University of Pittsburgh Medical School; Renee  Hobbs, Ed.D, Temple University

Adolescents who are skilled in interpreting media messages about tobacco may be less likely to smoke and less likely to start smoking in the future, according to a new study by University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine researchers. The report is now online in the American Journal of Health Behavior.

In this study, researchers assessed the media literacy of more than 1,200 adolescents. Media literacy is defined as the ability to understand, analyze and evaluate media messages in a wide variety of forms. Building on previous research, the study focused on determining associations between smoking outcomes and particular types of media literacy.

“Of the 442,000 people who die from smoking each year, the majority began smoking at age 18 or younger, and we know from our prior research that media exposure to smoking contributes strongly to the initiation of the habit in adolescents,” said Brian Primack, M.D., Ed.M., assistant professor of medicine and pediatrics at Pitt’s School of Medicine and lead author of the study. “In addition to attempting to change the way smoking is portrayed in the media, we can, as educators, develop innovative and effective ways to help young people analyze and interpret the smoking-related messages they see in the media. This research could help to focus those efforts.”

Brian A. Primack, MD, EdM, MS, Erika L. Douglas, MS, Michael J. Fine, MD, MSc, and Madeline A. Dalton, PhD

In an article published in the April 2009 issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, researchers found that teenagers who preferred popular songs with degrading sexual references were more likely to engage in intercourse or in pre-coital activities.

Writing in the article, Brian A. Primack, MD, EdM, MS, Center for Research on Health Care at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, states, "This study demonstrates that, among this sample of young adolescents, high exposure to lyrics describing degrading sex in popular music was independently associated with higher levels of sexual behavior. In fact, exposure to lyrics describing degrading sex was one of the strongest associations with sexual activity...These results provide further support for the need for additional research and educational intervention in this area."

Surveys were completed by 711 ninth-grade students at three large urban high schools. These participants were exposed to over 14 hours each week of lyrics describing degrading sex. About one third had previously been sexually active. Compared to those with the least exposure to lyrics describing degrading sex, those with the most exposure were more than twice as likely to have had sexual intercourse. The relationship between exposure to lyrics describing degrading sex and sexual experience held equally for both young men and women.

Similarly, among those who had not had sexual intercourse, those in the highest third of exposure to lyrics describing degrading sex were nearly twice as likely to have progressed along a noncoital sexual continuum compared to those in the lowest third. Finally, the relationships between exposure to lyrics describing non-degrading sex and sexual outcomes were not significant.

Marcella Nunez-Smith, MD, MHS; Elizabeth Wolf; Helen Mikiko Huang, MD; Ezekiel J. Emanuel, MD, PhD; and Cary P. Gross, MD

Media are increasingly pervasive in the lives of children and adolescents – the average kid today spends nearly 45 hours per week with media, compared with 17 hours with parents and 30 hours in school.  However, until now there has been very little comprehensive analysis of the different research tracking the impact of media on children’s health. 

Researchers from Yale University School of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, and California Pacific Medical Center reviewed 173 quantitative studies examining the relationship between media exposure and seven health outcomes:
•    childhood obesity
•    tobacco use
•    drug use
•    alcohol use
•    low academic achievement
•    sexual behavior
•    attention deficit disorder with hyperactivity
 
In 80% of the studies, greater media exposure is associated with negative health outcomes for children and adolescents.  This meta-analysis of the best studies on media and child health published in the last 28 years clearly shows the connection between media exposure and long-term negative health outcomes, and especially childhood obesity.

The study by the University of Liverpool of 60 British children aged 9-11 years, published at the European Congress on Obesity in Budapest, showed the more overweight a child was, the more it would eat when exposed to adverts followed by a cartoon.

Obese children increased food intake by 134 percent and normal weight children by 84 percent, the study said. Obese children consistently chose the highest fat product available in the research, chocolate.

In Britain 14 percent of children are classified as obese and around 30 percent as overweight or obese.

"It is the first (research) to demonstrate lean-obese differences in intake. Moreover, the adverts were not for the foods offered, so this was beyond a brand effect," Dr Jason Halford, lead author of the study said by email.

"The advertising industry claims adverts do not promote over-consumption but only cause children to switch brand ... previous studies have looked only at choice but did not allow (for) consumption."Read the full Brief, 04/24/2007

Researchers from the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies presented to Congress yesterday its study, "Food Marketing to Children and Youth: Threat or Opportunity?". The study finds "Food and beverage marketing targeted to children 12 and under, leads them to request and consume high-calorie, low-nutrient products." With those results in hand, the Institute of Medicine made several suggestions and recommendations:

- A call to food, beverage and restaurant companies, in addition to the entertainment and marketing media industries, to beef up their standards and enforce them, say for instance by using its licensed characters to promote healthful diets, and create a wider array of products that would be more nutritious, appealing and affordable.

- They suggested The Children\'s Advertising Review Unit expand and apply its voluntary guidelines to the new forms of marketing, including the Internet and mobile advertising as well as product placement.

- TV shows and other products that include storylines should weave healthy eating habits into the shows, movies and games.

- A suggestion that the government offer tax incentives to encourage companies to fully vest themselves in this process.

- And lastly, that the various industries self-regulate of their marketing efforts and specifically not market to their audience during children\'s programming. If after two years there has been no improvement, then Congress should enact legislation to that would hold the broadcast and cable TV to legal standards.

-Cynopsis:Kids!Read the full Brief, 12/07/2005

New research shows that exercise video games such as Wii Sports and Dance Dance Revolution boost children's activity levels significantly.

The Wii system, made by Nintendo, is controlled by a wireless remote that translates movements to its "Mii" caricature on screen. In Dance Dance Revolution, from video game maker Konami, players use their feet to hit arrows on the game's dance mat, matching their own steps with arrows set in time to music on screen.

This information comes on the heels of the July 7th announcement from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, which cited information from a previous study indicating that after decades of decline, smoking in the movies increased rapidly in the early 1990s and – by the year 2002 -- was back to levels last seen in 1950.

“This news is a wake-up call to public health officials and other leaders,” said American Legacy Foundation® President and CEO, Dr. Cheryl Healton. “We have seen a downward ‘ratings creep,’ in which studios are shifting depictions of smoking into teen-rated films, and research continues to prove the link between young people seeing smoking in movies and starting to smoke.” Teen-rated films are those movies earning G, PG and PG-13 ratings. Read the full Brief, 08/09/2006

New York Daily News Read the full Brief, 05/09/2006

Correctly taxing alcopops in California could:

• Save the lives of 21 youth each year
• Save $437 million each year
• Reduce underage alcopop consumption by 35 percent

Alcopops are sweetened alcoholic beverages that are often bubbly and fruit-flavored, and resemble soda or other soft drinks. While these products derive much of their alcohol from distilled spirits (and are often branded with spirit names such as "Smirnoff Ice"), industry calls them "flavored malt beverages," because that makes them sound like beer, which keeps their taxes low.

Thanks to a government petition filed by California Firday Night Live Partnerships and California Youth Council, two youth groups, the state is currently considering reclassifying alcopops as distilled spirits. Marin Institute undertook this original data analysis to calculate the true cost of alcopops in California, both in terms of lives and money. We emphasize the critical policy reason for taxing alcopops at the higher distilled spirits rate. We also estimate how much money industry generates from underage alcopop consumption. Finally, we describe how other countries are taxing alcopops significantly higher, with extremely positive results.Read the full Brief, 07/01/2007

Girls and young women who devote much time to the Internet, get too little sleep or regularly drink alcohol are more likely than their peers to put on excess weight, a new study suggests.The researchers, who followed more than 5,000 girls between 14 and 21 years old for 1 year, found that the more spare time girls spent on the Internet, the more their body mass index (BMI) increased.

Similar patterns were seen when the researchers looked at alcohol consumption and sleep. In the latter case, lack of sleep was linked to greater gains in BMI — a measure of weight in relation to height.

The findings, reported in The Journal of Pediatrics, add to evidence implicating each of these three habits in promoting weight gain.

The effect of each may be small, but over time the pounds can add up, according to the researchers, led by Dr. Catherine S. Berkey of Brigham & Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston.

The study involved 5,036 girls and young women who were surveyed regarding the number of recreational hours per week they spent on the Internet, which ranged from 1 to 5 hours, to 16-plus hours, as well as how long they typically slept each night (anywhere from 5 hours or less, to 9 hours or more) and how much alcohol they usually drank (ranging from none to two or more drinks per week).

In general, the researchers found, as Internet use climbed, so did BMI, particularly among girls younger than 18 years old.

Boosting daily physical activity from infancy through the teen years is a key to fighting fat, and parents need to set good examples by also adopting active lifestyles, the group says in a policy statement published in May\'s Pediatrics for release Monday.

The policy says pediatricians should ask patients and parents at regular office visits how active they are. They also should document how much time patients spend each day on sedentary activities and urge them to follow academy guidelines recommending no TV for children under age 2 and no more than two hours a day of TV, video games and other "screen time" for older children.

Also, schools should reinstate mandatory daily physical education from kindergarten through high school. These classes should allow participation by all children, including the disabled. Overweight and obese children should be encouraged to participate in activities such as water-based sports and strength training rather than weight-bearing activities, including jogging, that may be more difficult for them, the policy says.

Government figures published in April show that more than one-third of children in the USA are overweight and about 17% are obese.

The policy encourages parents to "become good role models by increasing their own level of physical activity" and to make active pursuits a part of the family lifestyle starting when children are infants.

Preschoolers should take part in unorganized outdoor activities and begin walking "tolerable distances" with family members. Older children and adolescents should be physically active for at least an hour a day, and organized sports may be started when children are school-age, the policy says.

"I\'ve been giving this advice for a long time. Most of the time parents don\'t feel that it is an imposition," says policy co-author Jorge Gomez, a pediatrician at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio.

For parents who say busy work schedules and other lifestyle factors make it hard for the family to be active, "we sit down and troubleshoot," Gomez says.

"It doesn\'t have to be strenuous, it doesn\'t have to be organized," just "something to promote the habit of being outdoors and active."

USA Today Read the full Brief, 05/01/2006

"Today the percentage of adolescents age 15-17 who are overweight is about 50 percent higher in poor as compared to non-poor families, a difference that has emerged recently," said Johns Hopkins\' sociologist Richard Miech, the study\'s lead author.

Obesity rates among all teens climbed substantially during the study, which covered 30 years. But the great divide according to income occurred most notably among the 15- to 17-year-old age group.

That led one outside expert to challenge the findings. Rand Corp. economist Roland Sturm said it seems implausible that younger teens would differ so much from older teens. Even if they do, he said, "It seems a rather secondary issue compared to the general trend in weight gain across all youth."

Read the full Brief, 05/24/2006

“This is a dangerous situation. For the first time, we have hard evidence that millions of kids are buying alcohol online and that the Internet is fast becoming a high-tech, low-risk way for kids to get beer, wine and liquor delivered to their home with no ID check,” WSWA Chairman Stan Hastings said. “This landmark data is alarming because state legislatures are rushing to allow wine and other online alcohol sales at a time we know regulatory agencies are telling us they are unable to monitor these types of sales because they lack manpower and resources.”

TRU RESEARCH
A new survey conducted by Teenage Research Unlimited (TRU)* confirms that a significant number of teens purchase beer, wine and liquor online. Specifically, TRU’s survey of 14- to 20-year-olds confirms:

3.1 million minors (12%) ages 14-20 report having a friend who has ordered alcohol online.
Two percent (551,000) of those ages 14-20 say they personally have bought alcohol online.
As exposure and awareness of buying alcohol online increase, even more minors can be expected to purchase wine, beer and liquor online. This is consistent with a 2003 National Academy of Sciences report which confirmed kids are buying alcohol online and that increasing use of the Internet will make this problem worse in the future. Nearly one in 10 (9%) of those ages 14-20 have visited a site that sells alcohol.
One-third – nearly 8.9 million ages 14-20 nationwide – are open to the possibility of an online alcohol purchase before age 21.
Seventy-five percent say their parents aren’t able to control what they do on the Internet.
Among those ages 14-20 who have tried alcohol, 75% tried liquor, followed by wine at 64%, beer at 60% and wine coolers at 55%.
Read the full Brief, 08/24/2006

It declares that efforts now being made in the USA to improve children\'s diets and increase their physical activity are "fragmented and small" and recommends that the president appoint a high-level task force to address the problem by coordinating the efforts and resources of federal agencies.

About 17% of children and teens in the USA are obese; an additional 16.5% are on the brink of becoming so, the report says. Extra pounds put children at an increased risk of being overweight adults and developing type 2 diabetes, high cholesterol, heart disease and other health problems.

The problem is one of the 21st century\'s "most critical public health issues," says Jeffrey Koplan, chairman of the report committee and former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "There is no one segment of society that\'s going to solve this alone. It has to be a concerted, coordinated effort. That\'s one of the things that\'s missing now."

The report calls on parents to work harder to encourage healthful eating and regular physical activity at home and the food industry to market more nutritious products.

It suggests the development of a community health index to evaluate kids\' access to physical activity and healthful foods such as fruits and vegetables. And it recommends continuing the government\'s VERB health promotion and ad campaign, which is designed to get children moving more but has lost its federal funding.

Read the full article from USA Today Read the full Brief, 09/13/2006

CHICAGO (AP) — When Susan Connor’s 3-year-old son started humming the McDonald’s jingle, a research project was born.

Connor knew where he’d heard the fast food giant’s catchy tune — on the Disney Channel during “The Wiggles,” a show for preschoolers.

“He had absorbed that from watching TV,” said Connor, whose study on food ads aimed at toddlers appears in the October issue of Pediatrics. “It would be a marketer’s dream to know they were that successful.”

Messages for high-fat, high-sugar foods permeate programming for preschoolers on Nickelodeon, the study found. On the Disney Channel’s shows for the youngest children and even on Public Broadcasting Service shows such as “Sesame Street,” companies woo tots’ loyalty by linking logos, licensed characters and slogans with fun and happiness.

Megan A. Moreno, Dimitri A. Christakis, et al.

Scientists at Seattle Children's Research Institute and the University of Washington randomly selected 500 MySpace profiles belonging to self-described 18-year-olds in the U.S. to determine what sort of information the average teen was sharing online. Their conclusion? The kids are not alright. Well, half of them anyways. Nearly 54% of the selected profiles revealed details about risky sexual lifestyles, drug addictions and violent encounters with peers.

The US market for foods and beverages targeting children is set to continue to experience strong growth, on the back of an increased demand for products specifically designed to address child nutrition, according to a new report.

Published by Packaged Facts, the report claims that in many product categories, the trend in developing foods for some of America\'s youngest and pickiest consumers is the key to category growth.

Sales of goods designed for the nation\'s 35.8 million kids aged three to eleven exceeded $15.1 billion in 2006, representing growth of 8.5 percent over the prior year, according to Kids\' Foods and Beverages. Total growth of the segment from 2001 to 2006 was set at almost 39 percent, with a compound annual growth rate of 6.6 percent.

And over the next five years annual growth is set at 11.5 percent, with the segment estimated to be worth almost $27 billion by 2011.

Studies have shown that television can be a factor in obesity in children. But this is the first to show a link between TV and blood pressure in obese children and teens.

Researchers found those children who watch between two and four hours of TV a day are two-and-a-half times more likely to have high blood pressure.. Read the full Brief, 10/30/2007

A new survey of Washington students shows most are making good choices about their health. Still, far too many regularly use alcohol, tobacco, drugs, and engage in risky behavior.

The Healthy Youth Survey focuses on health risk behaviors. The anonymous voluntary survey is taken every two years by more than 210,000 public school kids around the state in grades six, eight, 10, and 12. I

Some specific findings of the survey include:

- Among 8th-graders, 41 percent who drink alcohol say they get it from home, and about 24 percent say their parents haven't talked with them about alcohol and its risks.
- Seven percent of 8th and 10th-graders gambled at least once a month in the past year.
- Fewer students in grades 6, 8, and 12 say they enjoy being at school than in 2006. About one in five 8th-graders report skipping school in the past month.
- About 8 percent of 8th and 10th-graders have been a member of a gang during the past year.
- Among 6th-graders who sometimes feel sad or hopeless, about one in four say they do not have or are not sure if they have an adult in their life to talk to when they feel sad.
 - About 9 percent of 10th-graders report they tried to commit suicide in the past year, which is a similar rate to recent years.
- Only about 70 percent of 10th-graders say they always wear a seat belt -- similar to 2006.

"We are trying to demonstrate to people how massive the exposure is," said Dr. James Sargent, professor of pediatrics at Dartmouth Medical School. "Movies deliver billions of images of smoking to young people when they\'re very vulnerable to that message," he said.

While researchers haven\'t been able to confirm a cause-and-effect link between smoking in movies and smoking among children, many anti-tobacco activists assume there\'s a connection.

Indeed, research suggests that kids who watch movies that highlight smoking are more likely to smoke themselves, even when other factors are taken into account. Sargent has estimated that movies are responsible for about a third to 40 percent of all teen smoking.

In the new study, the Dartmouth team examined the incidents of tobacco use in 534 hit movies from 1998 to the first four months of 2003. Then, in a survey of more than 6,500 adolescents aged 10 to 14, they determined how many kids had seen those films.Read the full Brief, 05/08/2007

It’s a universally acknowledged truth that the idiot box is taking over kids’ lives. However, a new research has found that the easiest way to make sure that your kids grow up healthy, if not wealthy and wise, is to just switch the thing off.

In a new study, a group of University of Toronto researchers have found a direct link between the tube and inactivity that seems to be affecting kids nowadays.

"Because television is so commonplace in our society, we don\'t realize how much of an impact it has on youth," says co-author Professor Ken Allison of the department of public health sciences and principal investigator in the physical activity research program.

Prof Allison added that if parents wanted their kids to grow up healthy, then it was “crucial” that they started turning TVs off, and making sure that their kids got out of the house for some games instead.

"We need to be reminded that it is crucia

l to turn them off in order to establish healthy and active patterns in childhood and adolescence that will remain with individuals into adulthood," he said.

As a part of the study researchers tracked the weekly time spent on sedentary activities such as computer usage, video game playing and television viewing and then measured physical inactivity through daily energy expenditures assessed using a questionnaire.

Naomi Mendel, Arizona State University; Dirk Smeesters, Erasmus University

Crime TV has become a staple of the typical American viewer’s diet. From “Law & Order” and “CSI” — both of which come in three separate flavors — to “Criminal Minds,” “Cold Case” and “The Closer,” it’s hard to avoid the banquet of brutality offered up each week, each day or even each hour if you happen to have cable.

But a new study published in the Journal of Consumer Research may give viewers pause about all the death they’re routinely letting into their living rooms. Apparently, must-bleed-TV may just make you eat and shop more.

In the study, titled “The Sweet Escape,” researchers conducted four experiments revealing that “consumers who have been recently reminded of their own impending mortality” spend more on groceries — and actually eat more of those groceries.

Results from an ongoing survey reveal that university students lead generally unhealthy lives, characterized by little physical activity and unwholesome diets. For instance, nearly half of the male students surveyed were overweight or obese, while almost 30 percent of the female students were considered overweight or obese.

Even the scientists were surprised by the results.

"We were astounded," said study team member Joanne Burke of the University of New Hampshire.

Part of the problem, explained Burke, is the time spent in front of a screen for video games and TV watching. "I think it\'s a combination of the obesigenic environment," Burke said. "There\'s food at every corner; portion sizes have gotten bigger; students have gotten bigger."

The research, which was presented at a meeting of the American Physiological Society (APS) earlier this month in Washington, D.C., sheds light on the lifestyles of an age group for which little is known. Read the full Brief, 05/14/2007

The report indicated that the proportion of children ages six to 17 who were overweight increased from 6% in 1976 to 1980 to 11% in 1988 to 1994 and continued to rise to 18 in 2003 to 2004.Read the full Brief, 07/13/2007

White teenagers who are the most avid watchers of R-rated movies or who have television sets in their bedrooms are more than twice as likely to take up smoking compared with white teens who don\'t, according to a report published today.

Experts said the study confirmed Hollywood\'s pervasive influence by showing that even when other risk factors — such as peer smoking — were taken into account, media exposure remained a powerful force on white children.

The report also found that although African American teens watched more R-rated movies than their white classmates and were more likely to have their own TVs, their rate of smoking wasn\'t linked to their viewing habits.

"Why is it that whites are responsive to this and blacks aren\'t? What\'s going on?" asked Dr. James Sargent, a professor of pediatrics at Dartmouth Medical School who studies teen smoking but wasn\'t involved in the report.

Other researchers have documented a broad link between media exposure and teen smoking, but the new study, published in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, is the first to demonstrate that the effect isn\'t universal.

Christine Jackson, a social ecologist at the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation in Chapel Hill, N.C., and colleagues from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill interviewed 382 white students and 353 black students from the central part of the state in spring 2002.

At the time, the students were 12 to 14 years old, and none had tried a cigarette.

Two years later, 34% of the black teens had started smoking, as had 27% of the white teens.

As Jackson had anticipated, the biggest factors were having best friends who smoked, being a thrill-seeker and having inattentive parents.

But she found that for white teens, high exposure to R-rated movies made them 2.7 times as likely to start smoking. Having a TV in their bedroom made them 2.2 times as likely to take up the habit.

"As a researcher and a parent, I believe that teens are influenced by a variety of things they view in movies, including smoking," said Madeline Dalton, director of the Hood Center for Children and Families at Dartmouth Medical School, who was not involved in the research.

Virtually every R-rated movie released from 1988 to 1997 portrayed favorable images of smoking, according to a 2002 study by Dalton, Sargent and other researchers.Read the full Brief, 03/06/2007

Obesity or being overweight is seen as the most important health issue for U.S. children, according to a new poll commissioned by Research America and the Endocrine Society.

More than a quarter of Americans (27 percent) named obesity as the top health issue for kids, followed by lack of health care/insurance (16 percent) and nutrition/unhealthy diet (9 percent).

Americans are divided on whether addressing obesity is an individual or societal issue.

According to the poll, 52 percent think obesity is a public health issue that society should help solve; 46 percent say it is a private issue that people should deal with on their own.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Kids don\'t run outside and play like they used to, and parents say being a couch potato is a major culprit in the growing problem of childhood obesity in the United States.

Lack of exercise edged out easy access to junk food as the main concern of the 21 percent of parents who conceded in an AP-KOL poll that their children are overweight. KOL is the kids\' service of Internet service provider America Online.

Parents\' big frustration is how to change sedentary habits.

"What do kids like to do other than hang out with their friends?" asks Kim Nethery of Crestwood, Kentucky, who has tried fruitlessly to find a physical activity her 15-year-old daughter will do. Even a walk is difficult, because the family lives on a high-traffic country road risky for pedestrians.

Parents also fret over improving children\'s eating habits. More than half cited the cost of healthy food and television commercials and food packaging as at least a minor problem, according to the poll conducted by Ipsos for The Associated Press and KOL. Another issue: food served in school cafeterias.

Her son\'s middle school lets him order lunch a la carte, complained Margaret Gunderson of Loveland, Colorado.

"They\'re ordering pizza, ice cream. They blow through their lunch money by Tuesday," she said.

The U.S. government counts 9 million children ages 6 to 16 who are overweight, at increased risk for diabetes and other health problems, not to mention being teased by peers or left out of fun activities. Overweight children usually grow into overweight adults.

In the survey, children whose parents earned less than $50,000 a year were a little more likely to be overweight than those from more affluent families.

Children are supposed to get at least an hour of vigorous activity a day. But research shows far too few get anywhere close.

More than half the parents surveyed said their children had expressed a desire to exercise more, and 30 percent said their child wanted to lose weight.

Jeff Chabot, an engineer from Rutland, Vermont, said he encourages his children to participate in outdoor activities like snowmobiling and skiing.

Chabot said his older son is a little heavy. "Junk food is a big temptation," he said. "There\'s a temptation to park himself on the couch and eat after school."

Between heavy traffic that hinders bike-riding and easy access to video games, "children\'s forms of entertainment are much less active than the entertainment we had growing up," said teacher Dierde Karcher of Montclair, New Jersey.

Reducing time spent in front of television and computers has been proven to slow children\'s weight gain.

"We as parents need to do more," said Elena Penson, a sales clerk from Lufkin, Texas, whose family makes a point of going to a park twice a week to play catch. "But when we get home, we\'re tired, too. We\'ve gotten lazy."

The AP-KOL poll of 961 parents of children between ages 6-17 was conducted from Oct. 5-23 and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

-Associated Press, 11/4/05 Read the full Brief, 11/04/2005

"The public health implications of early television and video viewing are potentially large. There are both theoretical and empirical reasons to believe that the effects of media exposure on children’s development are more likely to be adverse before the age of about 30 months than afterward," the authors note. Recent studies suggest that what children younger than two years watch and whether they watch it alone or with a parent may be important for their vocabulary development.

Frederick J. Zimmerman, Ph.D., of the University of Washington, Seattle, and colleagues, conducted a telephone survey of 1,009 parents of children age 2 to 24 months. The study analyzed four television and DVD content categories: children’s educational, children’s non-educational, baby DVDs/videos and grown-up television (such as talk shows or sports programming). Average daily viewing, reasons parents gave for their child’s viewing, who was present during viewing and socio-demographic factors were reported.

The median age of initiating viewing was 9 months. The average amount of viewing time for the children was 40.2 minutes per day. At 3 months of age children watched less than an hour per day and by 24 months they watched more than 1.5 hours per day. "Approximately half of the viewing was of shows that parents reported to be in the children’s educational category," the authors note. "The remaining half was approximately equally split among children’s non-educational content, baby DVDs/videos and grown-up television." Read the full Brief, 05/07/2007

The study, by pediatric researchers at the University of Washington, also found that by age 2, 90 percent of children are watching television an average of more than 90 minutes a day.

Such early exposure to screens can have a negative impact on an infant\'s rapidly developing brain and put children at a higher risk for attention problems, diminished reading comprehension, and obesity, researchers said.

Researchers said they were surprised not only by the number of hours young children are spending in front of the television but also by the primary reason: Most parents are using television as an educational tool, not for the more conventional explanation of baby-sitting. Despite nearly a decade of warnings by pediatricians to the contrary, parents believe the content of programs aimed at babies is good for brain development.

"I wouldn\'t be so upset about this if I thought parents were doing it because they needed a break to take a shower or make dinner," said Dimitri Christakis, who co-authored the study. "What I\'m troubled by is the notion that parents think it\'s good for their kids."Read the full Brief, 05/29/2007

Robert Hart, Intuitive Media; Professor Karen Pine,  University of Hertfordshire School of Psychology, United Kingdom

The Learning in the Family report which looked at how families are involved in children’s learning, was funded by Becta, commissioned by Intuitive Media Research Services and co-authored by Robert Hart of Intuitive Media and Professor Karen Pine, at the University’s School of Psychology. They conducted two online surveys with a sample of 4,606 children aged six to fourteen, going into more depth with a further 2,535 children and then interviewed twelve families.

The aim was to assess how parents engage with children learning new technology and how parents could better support their children’s learning.

The survey found that 94 percent of the girls said that they used a computer or laptop compared with only 88 per cent of the boys. It also found that 50 per cent of children chose their mothers to help them to use new technologies, versus 22 per cent, which chose their fathers.

 
Another key finding was that 40 percent of children surveyed wanted to see an improvement in parental involvement and many of the parents interviewed said that they would like to learn more through online courses, through the television or through their local school or college.

CHICAGO (AP) — "Arthur" and "Barney" are OK for toddler TV-watching. But not "Rugrats" and certainly not "Power Rangers," reports a new study of early TV-watching and future attention problems.

The research involved children younger than 3, so TV is mostly a no-no anyway, according to the experts. But if TV is allowed, it should be of the educational variety, the researchers said.

Every hour per day that kids under 3 watched violent child-oriented entertainment their risk doubled for attention problems five years later, the study found. Even nonviolent kids\' shows like "Rugrats" and "The Flintstones" carried a still substantial risk for attention problems, though slightly lower.Read the full Brief, 11/04/2007

Supports studies finding relationship between high video game play and ADD

AMES, Iowa – Parents have long lectured their children about the mind-numbing effects of playing video games all day. And a new Iowa State University study has found that high volume action video game players -- those who play around 40 hours per week -- actually had more difficulty keeping focused on tasks requiring longer, more proactive attention than those who played video games less than a couple of hours a week.

The study, published online last week in the latest issue of the professional journal Psychophysiology, also supports research published within the last year establishing a positive association between being addicted to playing video games and having Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD).

Television viewing in adolescence was a predictor of leaving school, while childhood viewing was a stronger predictor of not attaining a university degree. In fact, children who watched television less than one hour a day were the most likely to obtain postschool qualifications and university degrees.

Excessive television viewing and its negative impact on educational achievement is likely to have further consequences for socioeconomic status and well-being. Read the full Brief, 07/05/2005

Barbara J. Wilson, Ph.D.; Dale Kunkel, Ph.D.; and Kristin L. Drogos, M.A., University of Arizona

"Educationally/Insufficient? An Analysis of the Availability & Educational Quality of Children’s E/I Programming" reveals substantial deficiencies in children’s educational television programming and raises serious doubts about broadcasters’ commitments to the nation’s children. It evaluated the quality of programs claimed as educational/informational (E/I) by commercial stations and found that only one of every eight E/I shows (13%) is rated as “highly educational.” In contrast, almost twice as many, nearly one of every four (23%) were classified in the lowest category of "minimally educational."

Meanwhile, kids with access to a computer at home earn higher test scores. The study reports that these differences are consistent regardless of the amount of time a student says they spend on homework. The survey included about 350 third-graders at six public schools in northern California in 2000. The researchers found 70+% of the students reported having a TV in their bedroom. These students scored between seven and nine points lower on standardized mathematics, reading and language arts tests than did their peers.

On the flip side, those with access to home computers scored between seven and nine points higher than those without.

A similar study conducted in New Zealand was also just released. That study followed about 1,000 kids-ages 5-26, and it too found that the amount of TV viewing affected the academic performance of those in the study, regardless of a subject\'s family socio-economic standing or general intelligence and behavioral issues.Read the full Brief, 07/05/2005

The study points out that many of the claims made by marketing materials are unsubstantiated but that the market for these ‘educational’ toys is expanding rapidaly. Vicky Rideout, vice president of the Kaiser Foundation points out that “the research hasn\'t advanced much. There really isn\'t any outcomes-based research on these kinds of products and their effects on young children, and there doesn\'t seem to be any theoretical basis for saying that kids under 2 can learn from media.

"If parents are thinking, \'I need a break, I\'ll put my 4-year-old in front of this nice harmless video,\' that\'s one thing," she continued, "But if parents are thinking, \'This is good for my 3-month-old, it will help her get ahead in the world,\' that\'s another."

But the market for genius toys for babies is growing quickly. The study summarizes the recommendations of early childhood advocates:

• Vastly increase research on the impact of educational media products on very young children. To date there is remarkably little data regarding how learning-oriented electronic media products are used in the daily lives of young children, let alone whether they have a positive, negative, or neutral effect on their young users. In particular, child development experts argue that we need a much better understanding of media’s impact on brain development, future media use, and displacement of other activities. And educators want to see scientific outcomes research that uses comparison groups so they can make accurate assessments of whether media teaches children more or less effectively than other alternatives.(33)

• Create an independent, non-profit review service that would make professional assessments of educational media products available to parents free of charge. To date, there is limited information available on websites, but it is not always transparent either who has funded the product reviews, or what the educational or developmental qualifications are of the reviewers. Proponents argue that a comprehensive review site using independent child development experts could bring parents information that they would know is objective and free of marketing.

• Consider creating clearer standards for products marketed to parents as educational. Some advocates argue that products clearly designed and marketed as educational can and should be held to a different standard than those that make no such claims. After all, they point out, while there is no gold standard for having fun, there are metrics of cognitive achievement, and real or implied claims to this effect may warrant some justification. And unlike the detailed guidelines that have been issued by the Federal Trade Commission for advertising and labeling of products such as household furniture, dietary supplements, cashmere, and down pillows, the marketing of educational media products for young children has not received much attention. Under policies enforced by the Federal Trade Commission, all products must be advertised non-deceptively and with substantiation. When product claims are explicit (e.g., “studies have shown” or “tests have proven”) the FTC expects a higher level of substantiation, while in cases where product attributes and effects are implied, the amount of substantiation required is subject to interpretation.

• Support the development of non-commercial educational media content for young children. Some of those who believe that interactive media do offer an important educational tool for young children also feel that policies should be enacted to encourage the creation of high-quality educational content. As one long-time media researcher has written, “If we are serious about using the new electronic media for children’s welfare, then we should emphasize policies designed to promote positive content rather than relying solely on those designed to prohibit access or restrict content. Our experience with television tells us that leaving the media environment entirely to commercial producers for whom the ‘bottom line’ is primary does not usually generate high-quality content.”

Given society’s growing awareness of the importance of early childhood development – and parents’ strong desire to help their children succeed – it seems likely that the market for media products for infants, toddlers, and preschoolers will continue to grow, and that educational benefits will continue to be a central theme in the marketing of those products.

This report begins the process of better understanding an emerging market that could impact the youngest generation of Americans. And while the report does not endorse any of the specific proposals listed above, it does highlight the importance of deepening our understanding of the impact of media on very young children, and of developing ways to help parents make more informed choices.

-Liz Perle Read the full Brief, 12/14/2005

Findings show that the mean age at which children began watching videos was 6.1 and the mean age at which they began to watch television was 9.8 months. Babies as young as 1 month old watch television and videos, and their amount of viewing increases with age. By 23 months, 100% of the children in the sample watched television and 90% watched videos.

Along with an analysis of television and video viewing habits, the study provided an analysis of content programs similar to those viewed by the children in the study. Content analyses revealed that video and television programs that infants and toddlers enjoy offer many opportunities for parents to engage in reinforcing cognitive and social skills. This study suggests for parents to interact with their children while watching educational television.

Integrating media into the lives of young children is beneficial when applied in a developmentally appropriate way. Read the full Brief, 09/30/2005

“Parents excel when it comes to introducing their very young children to beautiful picture books and bedtime stories, but when their kids start reading independently, parents need to become more, not less, involved,” stated Lisa Holton, President Scholastic Book Fairs and Trade Publishing. “As kids get older, the role parents play changes. We found that not only do parents need to be reading role models, but that they must play a key role in helping their older children select books that capture their imagination and interest.”

Almost three-quarters of parents surveyed (74%) say they value reading as the most important skill for a child to develop -- followed by critical thinking (49%), math (46%), social (46%) and computer (27%) skills. While two-thirds of parents agree that strong reading skills are critical to future success and 80% say it is very important for kids to read books for fun outside of school, only 21% of parents identify themselves as high frequency readers (reading every day). Read the full Brief, 08/09/2006

CHICAGO -- Parents now have science to back them up when they say, "Turn off the TV. It\'s a school night."

Middle school students who watch TV or play video games during the week do worse in school, a new study finds, but weekend viewing and gaming doesn\'t affect school performance much.

"On weekdays, the more they watched, the worse they did," said study co-author Dr. Iman Sharif of Children\'s Hospital at Montefiore in the Bronx. "They could watch a lot on weekends and it didn\'t seem to correlate with doing worse in school."

The research, led by Jeffrey G. Johnson of Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and the New York State Psychiatric Institute, also found that it was TV watching that contributed to learning problems -- not the other way around.

"Our findings suggest that teenagers who spent a lot of time watching TV tend to be more likely to have attention and learning problems that persist and interfere with their long-term educational achievement," said Johnson.

"Whether teens had existing attention or learning problems or whether they didn\'t have them, they were at greater risk for later attention and learning problems," Johnson said.

Johnson advises parents to limit the amount of time they let their children watch TV. "About one to two hours a day," he said. "And they should be watching quality programming," he added.

Video games can have the same effect as TV, Johnson said. "The problem with video games is that most of them have very little educational value. And some games may promote the development of attention problems," he said.

Johnson recommends limiting access to TV, for example not allowing a TV in the child\'s room. If the child has unrestricted access to TV, in the long-term they may have more difficulties reaching their potential as adults."Read the full Brief, 05/07/2007

Certain types of video games can have beneficial effects, improving gamers' dexterity as well as their ability to problem-solve – attributes that have proven useful not only to students but to surgeons, according to research recently discussed at the Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association.

In one paper, Fordham University psychologist Fran C. Blumberg, PhD, and Sabrina S. Ismailer, MSED, examined 122 fifth-, sixth- and seventh-graders' problem-solving behavior while playing a video game that they had never seen before to show that playing video games can improve cognitive and perceptual skills.

In a second paper, Iowa State University psychologist Douglas Gentile, PhD, and William Stone, BS, described several studies involving high school and college students and laparoscopic surgeons that looked at their video game usage and its effects.

Other studies involving students showed that those who played more entertainment games did poorer in school and were at greater risk for obesity.

The study points out that many of the claims made by marketing materials are unsubstantiated but that the market for these ‘educational’ toys is expanding rapidly. Vicky Rideout, vice president of the Kaiser Foundation points out that “the research hasn\'t advanced much. There really isn\'t any outcomes-based research on these kinds of products and their effects on young children, and there doesn\'t seem to be any theoretical basis for saying that kids under 2 can learn from media.

"If parents are thinking, \'I need a break, I\'ll put my 4-year-old in front of this nice harmless video,\' that\'s one thing," she continued, "But if parents are thinking, \'This is good for my 3-month-old, it will help her get ahead in the world,\' that\'s another."

The study summarizes the recommendations of early childhood advocates:

• Vastly increase research on the impact of educational media products on very young children. To date there is remarkably little data regarding how learning-oriented electronic media products are used in the daily lives of young children, let alone whether they have a positive, negative, or neutral effect on their young users. In particular, child development experts argue that we need a much better understanding of media’s impact on brain development, future media use, and displacement of other activities. And educators want to see scientific outcomes research that uses comparison groups so they can make accurate assessments of whether media teaches children more or less effectively than other alternatives.

• Create an independent, non-profit review service that would make professional assessments of educational media products available to parents free of charge. To date, there is limited information available on websites, but it is not always transparent either who has funded the product reviews, or what the educational or developmental qualifications are of the reviewers. Proponents argue that a comprehensive review site using independent child development experts could bring parents information that they would know is objective and free of marketing.

• Consider creating clearer standards for products marketed to parents as educational. Some advocates argue that products clearly designed and marketed as educational can and should be held to a different standard than those that make no such claims. After all, they point out, while there is no gold standard for having fun, there are metrics of cognitive achievement, and real or implied claims to this effect may warrant some justification. And unlike the detailed guidelines that have been issued by the Federal Trade Commission for advertising and labeling of products such as household furniture, dietary supplements, cashmere, and down pillows, the marketing of educational media products for young children has not received much attention. Under policies enforced by the Federal Trade Commission, all products must be advertised non-deceptively and with substantiation. When product claims are explicit (e.g., “studies have shown” or “tests have proven”) the FTC expects a higher level of substantiation, while in cases where product attributes and effects are implied, the amount of substantiation required is subject to interpretation.

• Support the development of non-commercial educational media content for young children. Some of those who believe that interactive media do offer an important educational tool for young children also feel that policies should be enacted to encourage the creation of high-quality educational content. As one long-time media researcher has written, “If we are serious about using the new electronic media for children’s welfare, then we should emphasize policies designed to promote positive content rather than relying solely on those designed to prohibit access or restrict content. Our experience with television tells us that leaving the media environment entirely to commercial producers for whom the ‘bottom line’ is primary does not usually generate high-quality content.”

Given society’s growing awareness of the importance of early childhood development – and parents’ strong desire to help their children succeed – it seems likely that the market for media products for infants, toddlers, and preschoolers will continue to grow, and that educational benefits will continue to be a central theme in the marketing of those products.

This report begins the process of better understanding an emerging market that could impact the youngest generation of Americans. And while the report does not endorse any of the specific proposals listed above, it does highlight the importance of deepening our understanding of the impact of media on very young children, and of developing ways to help parents make more informed choices.

Read the full Brief, 12/14/2005

Television has attracted young viewers since broadcasting began in the 1940s. Concerns about the effects of television on young children emerged almost immediately, and have been fueled by a steady stream of academic research showing a negative association between television viewing and student achievement. These findings have made the introduction and diffusion of television a popular explanation for trends such as the decline in average verbal SAT scores during the 1970s (Wirtz et al, 1977; Winn, 2002), and the secular decline in verbal ability across cohorts(Glenn, 1994). They have contributed to a widespread belief among pediatricians that television is detrimental to cognitive development and academic achievement (Gentile et al, 2004), and have provided partial motivation for recent recommendations that young children’s television viewing time be severely restricted (American Academy of Pediatrics, 2001). Given the important role that cognitive skills play in individual (Griliches and Mason, 1972) and aggregate (Bishop, 1989) labor market performance, understanding the cognitive effects of television viewing may have significant implications for public policy and household behavior.

In this paper, we identify the effect of childhood exposure to television on cognitive development by exploiting variation in the year of introduction of television to U.S. cities (Gentzkow, 2006). Television was introduced to most U.S. cities in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and was adopted rapidly, especially by families with children. Additionally, survey evidence suggests that young children who had television in their homes during this period watched as much as three hours of television per day, considerably more than the time spent listening to the radio for analogous ages in the 1930s. Finally, evidence from surveys of television ownership suggest that the diffusion of television was broad-based, reaching families in many different socioeconomic strata. These facts make the introduction of television in the United States a unique laboratory in which to study the effects of television on children

--Matthew Gentzkow, University of Chicago; Jesse M. Shapiro, University of Chicago and NBER

Read the full Brief, 02/16/2006

The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop released a report yesterday that specifies how increased national investment in research-based digital games can play a cost-effective and transformative role. The report Game Changer: Investing in Digital Play to Advance Children’s Learning and Health provides recommendations for the media industry, government, philanthropy and academia to harness the appeal of digital games to improve children’s health and learning.

Matthew Gentzkow, Jesse M. Shapiro, University of Chicago; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

The Chicago study came out of the Graduate School of Business, where young economists have been looking at media and its effects. Although based on an old data set, it offers new confirmation of the evolving views of television.

Standardized testing of almost 350,000 6th, 9th and 12th-grade students showed that the students who had more exposure to television in early childhood did slightly better on the tests than those with less exposure.

"We find strong evidence against the view that childhood television viewing harms the cognitive or educational development of preschoolers," write Jesse Shapiro and Matthew Gentzkow in the paper, published this year in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

There's a big caveat: The testing data are from 1965, because those kids had been around when television rolled out from city to city in the U.S., providing what essentially hasn't been seen in the United States since, a large-scale, clear-cut, before-and-after comparison.

"It's an open question how the ways in which television is different now than then would affect the data," says Shapiro, an assistant professor of economics at the GSB.

Early research demonstrated that children can learn specific behaviors from television. Studies since the 1960s have produced evidence that media violence contributes to anxiety, desensitization, and increased aggression. Research and advertising show that young children are vulnerable to persuasive intent which lead to concerns regarding child health in ads promoting unhealthy snacks. On a positive note, educational television enhances children’s cognitive abilities and school readiness.

Research is still limited and needs to keep up with the pace of new media development. Research is needed to investigate the effects of new, interactive media marketed to young children, and infants. Also, media literacy programs and parental education should be promoted further. Read the full Brief, 01/30/2005

Washington, D.C. – Electronic media is a central focus of many very young children’s lives, used by parents to help manage busy schedules, keep the peace, and facilitate family routines such as eating, relaxing, and falling asleep, according to a new national study released today by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Many parents also express satisfaction with the educational benefits of TV and how it can teach positive behaviors. The report, The Media Family: Electronic Media in the Lives of Infants, Toddlers, Preschoolers, and Their Parents, is based on a national survey of 1,051 parents with children age 6 months to 6 years old and a series of focus groups across the country.

According to the study, in a typical day more than eight in ten (83%) children under the age of six use screen media, with those children averaging about two hours a day (1:57). Media use increases with age, from 61% of babies one year or younger who watch screen media in a typical day (for an average of 1:20) to 90% of 4 to 6 year-olds (for an average of 2:03).

Read the full Brief, 05/24/2006

Beverly Plester, Clare Wood, Puja Joshi

Text speak (or, rather, TXT SP3EAK) not only doesn't harm literacy in children, researchers have found, but its use is actually positively correlated with their language and reading skills. ... children who use "textisms" on mobile phones tend to have a better grasp of (normal) word reading, vocabulary, and phonological awareness, even when controlled for age, memory, and how long they have owned a phone.

Researchers ... studied the texting behavior of 88 British children between the ages of 10 and 12 and how it related to their school literacy skills. They gave the kids 10 different scenarios and asked them to write text messages to describe each situation; their textisms were split into categories (shortenings, contractions, acronyms, symbols, non-conventional spellings, etc.) and analyzed for their use of language as it compared to their school performance.

"As expected, we found associations between textism use and phonological awareness," wrote the researchers in their report. "What is most important, the extent of the children's textism use was able to predict significant variance in their word reading ability[...] This suggests that children's use of textisms is not only positively associated with word reading ability, but that it may be contributing to reading development in a way that goes beyond simple phonologically based explanations."

The folks aren\'t just reading out-loud, 81% of those surveyed said they read to their kids using funny voices, 39% act out the characters as they read; 35% take turns with the kids turning the pages, and 19% singing portions of the book.

While this is all good news, reading still lags behind TV viewing for kids as the number one thing to do when relaxing. The study reports that 53% of kids turn on the TV if the have the choice, only 31% would sit down to read a book, 11% play video games and 5% are online. It is dads, 95% of those participating in the study, that are the ones reading to kids, and they are also actors in the house with 46% of the guys saying that they act out the characters while reading to make reading fun. All of the parents surveyed reported that reading to their kids in important and acknowledge that as parents they are the most important role in helping their kids learn to read.

As for what books are being read, that is a shared decision with 76% parents reporting they choose or recommend the book, and 69% of kids selecting. The survey was conducted by Impulse Research Corporation in March 2005.

Cynopsis: Kids! 06/14/05Read the full Brief, 06/14/2005

Daniel Anderson, Ph.D., University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Daniel Bronfin, M.D., Ochsner Health System, New Orleans

Even if young children aren't watching the TV, it may be distracting them from their play and depriving them of developing critical attention skills, a new study says.

When children aged 3 and younger played in a room with a television on that was tuned to adult programming, they played for about 5 percent less time than when there was no background TV. More importantly, when there was no background TV, the children's play was more focused with longer play episodes, the study found.

"Background TV is a disruptive and distracting influence. Our evidence is that TV keeps the children from sustaining their attention at a time when developmentally, they're beginning to organize their attention skills and sequencing behaviors," said study senior author Daniel Anderson, a professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

"Parents think it [background TV] doesn't matter because the programs aren't directed at children, but just because a child isn't paying active attention doesn't mean it doesn't have a disruptive effect," he added.

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommends that children 2 years old and younger be exposed to no screen time. For older children, the AAP suggests limiting screen time -- including TV, video games and computer use -- to one to two hours a day of active viewing time. Guidelines haven't specifically addressed background TV. d Medical School in Boston.

Interactive characters -- those who speak directly into the camera and wait for a child\'s response -- may serve as a meaningful source of information for young viewers.

\'\'We\'ve known for some time that watching video is not an especially efficient way for toddlers to learn,\'\' said Georgene Troseth, study co-author and assistant professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. ``Young children seem to learn better from directly interacting with people.\'\'

Read the full Brief, 06/01/2006

Several high-quality educational television shows, including Blues Clues, Sesame Street, Barney, and others, have prove educational value when viewed appropriately by children age 2-1/2 to 5 years. In contrast, no commercial television programs or videos have demonstrated a benefit for children under age 2 years, and heavy television viewing between age 0 and 3 years has been associated with subsequent developmental problems with attention and impaired reading and mathematical proficiency.Read the full Brief, 07/20/2007

British children's brain development is being threatened by their failure to work with their hands in school and at home, said a report released on Monday.

With woodwork, metalwork, craft, music or car mechanic classes dropped by many schools and children wanting to play computer games at home, the UK is becoming a "software instead of a screwdriver society," said the report, commissioned by the Ruskin Mill Educational Trust.

"Working with one's own hands in a real-world 3-D environment is imperative for full cognitive and intellectual development," said the report's author Dr. Aric Sigman.

"Research is showing that increasing time spent in the virtual world of computers is displacing hands-on play and hands-on learning.

"That allows young people to experience how the world works in practice, to gain an understanding of materials and processes and to make informed judgments about abstract concepts."

The report cited examples of 11-year-olds with deficits in certain areas of their cognitive development and a decline in the ability of young engineers and apprentices to conceptualize straightforward mechanical problems.

"The findings of this report clearly point to strengthening the role of '3-D' learning and crafts in educational policy-making today," said Sigman.

"The implications for the economy are significant and will actually improve the workforce's ability to use computers in research, design and development.

"But parents too have a responsibility to ensure their children have more of a 'hands-on' upbringing."

Sigman also warned class-obsessed Britons needed to drop their snobbish attitude to hands-on vocational training within schools.

"Working with your hands is considered declasse and the sciences are often seen as 'trade,"' said Dr. Sigman.

"Research is showing that increasing time spent in the virtual world of computers is displacing hands-on play and hands-on learning.

"That allows young people to experience how the world works in practice, to gain an understanding of materials and processes and to make informed judgments about abstract concepts."

The report cited examples of 11-year-olds with deficits in certain areas of their cognitive development and a decline in the ability of young engineers and apprentices to conceptualize straightforward mechanical problems. 
 

See Jane seeks to engage professionals and parents in a call to dramatically increase the percentages of female characters -- and to reduce gender stereotyping -- in media made for children 0-11. See Jane founder, Academy Award winner Geena Davis, says, "By making it common for our youngest children to see everywhere a balance of active and complex male and female characters, girls and boys will grow up to empathize with and care more about each others\' stories."

In collaboration with Ms. Davis and an Advisory Board of media professionals and educators, the project is administered by the respected national non-profit Dads and Daughters, whose advocacy has changed public policy and corporate marketing. Research, education, activism and collaboration are the project\'s hallmarks as we work hand-in-hand with professionals to improve our children\'s earliest media exposure from the inside out.

Read the full Brief, 03/23/2006

But a new study suggests reading articles about diet and weight loss could have unhealthy consequences later.

Teenage girls who frequently read magazine articles about dieting were more likely five years later to practice extreme weight-loss measures such as vomiting than girls who never read such articles, the University of Minnesota study found.

It didn’t seem to matter whether the girls were overweight when they started reading about weight loss, nor whether they considered their weight important. After taking those factors into account, researchers still found reading articles about dieting predicted later unhealthy weight loss behavior.

Girls in middle school who read dieting articles were twice as likely five years later to try to lose weight by fasting or smoking cigarettes, compared to girls who never read such articles. They were three times more likely to use measures such as vomiting or taking laxatives, the study found. Read the full Brief, 01/02/2007

A recent study finds movies aimed at young children are top-heavy with physically aggressive male characters.

Whether it\'s Pokemon or Nemo, Tarzan or Thomas — a pocket monster, clownfish, jungle boy or tank engine — the character is just the beginning of the story when it comes to skewed portrayals of males in kids\' movies.

Male characters in G-rated movies, whether animated or live action, not only outnumber female characters by a lopsided margin, but they are also portrayed as disconnected and physically aggressive, according to researchers at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California.

Their report, "G Movies Give Boys a D," is their second in a series based on research commissioned by "See Jane," a program to reduce gender stereotyping in media for children 11 and younger. Actress Geena Davis and Dads & Daughters, a Duluth-based national nonprofit organization, founded the program.

The researchers studied the 101 top-grossing, general-audience films released from 1990 through 2004, analyzing 4,249 speaking characters. Male characters, they discovered, dominated casts and stories, with three male characters for every female character. Also, more than two out of three speaking characters and more than four out of five narrators were male in the films studied.

Robert Parungao, who studied the topic as part of his honours degree in sociology at the University of British Columbia, looked at four best-selling games: Kung Fu, Warcraft 3, Shadow Warrior and Grand Theft Auto 3.

Parungao, an avid gamer, says the games feature evil gangsters, all of them non-white, who "function as narrative obstacles to be overcome, mastered or ultimately blown to smithereens by the white hero".

He says while blatant racism is not tolerated in mainstream films or television, in video games "it\'s below the radar".

Parungao says his study has had a mixed response.

"Some say [racist stereotypes in games] is terrible," he says. "Other people in the games community say, \'Lighten up, it\'s a game, you don\'t have to worry about political correctness.\'"

A fifth-generation Canadian of Chinese and Filipino ancestry, Parungao says that with video game sales at about US$30 billion worldwide, making them more popular than movies, negative stereotypes matter.

He admits that not all games, or game publishing companies, promote such stereotypes, but says racism is rife among many of the most popular games, which are designed and published mostly in the US and Japan.

"These aren\'t just kids\' toys, these are representative of our society and they teach us," he says.

Parungao\'s study is one of the first to look at racism in video games, says Associate Professor Richard Smith, a specialist in technology and society at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.

"We\'ve heard about sex and violence, but I can\'t remember hearing about racism in video games," says Smith.

"The most insidious thing about racism is when people accept it. Studies like this help create consciousness."

But Smith cautioned there\'s no academic consensus that violence and sexism in media affects real-world attitudes, and says the impact of racist images will be hard to measure.

"This is new territory," says Smith. Read the full Brief, 07/21/2006

Other findings from the 2005-2006 State of Our Nation\'s Youth report:

-70% of students said they watch at least 30min of news on TV a few times a week

-54% say they read a newspaper a few times a week

-62% of students reported they have a cell phone, vs. last year\'s report of 51% -40% of student see their family\'s income as average, with 32% saying their family income as slightly above average and 20% viewing it as slightly below average

-73% of teens have less admiration for professional athletes who use steroids

-72% of students surveyed said they would work harder to meet higher academic standards

-71% teens said they preferred a home cooked meal over eating at restaurant, take-out or fast food

-46% of teens surveyed would choose spending more time with family over more money for material possessions or a bigger house

-Cynthia Turner\'s Cynopsis: Kids 08/11/05Read the full Brief, 08/11/2005

The report, Parents, Children & Media: A Kaiser Family Foundation Survey, is a national survey of 1,008 parents of children ages 2-17, along with a series of six focus groups held with parents across the country. The survey explores such issues as media content, media ratings and the V-Chip, media monitoring, educational media, advertising, and the Internet. Read the full Brief, 06/19/2007

Robert Hart, Intuitive Media; Professor Karen Pine,  University of Hertfordshire School of Psychology, United Kingdom

The Learning in the Family report which looked at how families are involved in children’s learning, was funded by Becta, commissioned by Intuitive Media Research Services and co-authored by Robert Hart of Intuitive Media and Professor Karen Pine, at the University’s School of Psychology. They conducted two online surveys with a sample of 4,606 children aged six to fourteen, going into more depth with a further 2,535 children and then interviewed twelve families.

The aim was to assess how parents engage with children learning new technology and how parents could better support their children’s learning.

The survey found that 94 percent of the girls said that they used a computer or laptop compared with only 88 per cent of the boys. It also found that 50 per cent of children chose their mothers to help them to use new technologies, versus 22 per cent, which chose their fathers.

 
Another key finding was that 40 percent of children surveyed wanted to see an improvement in parental involvement and many of the parents interviewed said that they would like to learn more through online courses, through the television or through their local school or college.

Jennifer R. Linder, Douglas A. Gentile, Iowa State University

This study had two goals: first, to examine the validity of the television rating system for assessing aggression in programs popular among girls; second, to evaluate the importance of inclusion of non-physical forms of aggression in the ratings system by examining associations between television aggression exposure and behavior. Ninety-nine fifth grade girls listed their favorite programs; 76 programs were coded for total, rewarded, and justified indirect, verbal, and physical aggression. Teachers reported participants' aggressive and prosocial behaviors. Results indicated that the age-based ratings do not reflect the amount of total indirect and verbal aggression in programs, and there were higher levels of physical aggression and justified verbal aggression in children's programs than in programs for general audiences, contrary to hypotheses. The industry violent content ratings identified programs with higher mean levels of physical aggression, but did not distinguish programs that contained violence from those that did not. Exposure to televised physical aggression, verbal aggression, and rewarded indirect aggression was associated with higher child aggression and decreased prosocial behavior. Implications for the validity of the industry ratings are discussed.

The research was done for TV Watch, a broad-based coalition that opposes government control of TV programming and promotes the use of tools like content ratings and parental controls. Its members include the American Conservative Union, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, The Creative Coalition, Viacom, News Corp., and NBC-Universal.

The survey also revealed that 85 percent of parents found TV ratings useful; 66 percent found cable blocking technology helpful; and 56 percent said the V-chip technology was good in preventing kids from seeing specific programs.

Congress has considered legislation that would increase fines for indecent broadcasts to $500,000 per incident from the current $32,500 for a TV licensee, and from $11,000 to $500,000 for an individual entertainer. The report comes on the eve of a Senate hearing that will focus on racy television programming.

-By Wayne Friedman, MediaPost Read the full Brief, 11/29/2005

Brian A. Primack, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine

Teens who spend long hours watching television are at higher risk for depression as adults, a new study finds.

Participants faced significantly greater odds of being depressed seven years later, and the risk rose with each hour of daily television viewed, according to a report involving more than 4,000 teenagers.

The same association was found for exposure to other electronic media, the researchers noted.

The more than 4,100 adolescents in the study were first asked in 1995 about the number of hours they had spent the previous week watching television or videocassettes, playing computer games, or listening to the radio. They reported an average daily exposure of about 5.7 hours, including 2.3 hours of television viewing.

Seven years later, at an average age of almost 22, 308 (7.4 percent) of the young people had developed symptoms consistent with depression. The incidence of those symptoms was directly related with the number of hours of exposure to television and other electronic media reported at the start of the study, the researchers noted.
 

Barbara J. Wilson, Ph.D.; Dale Kunkel, Ph.D.; and Kristin L. Drogos, M.A., University of Arizona

"Educationally/Insufficient? An Analysis of the Availability & Educational Quality of Children’s E/I Programming" reveals substantial deficiencies in children’s educational television programming and raises serious doubts about broadcasters’ commitments to the nation’s children. It evaluated the quality of programs claimed as educational/informational (E/I) by commercial stations and found that only one of every eight E/I shows (13%) is rated as “highly educational.” In contrast, almost twice as many, nearly one of every four (23%) were classified in the lowest category of "minimally educational."

Tracy L.M. Kennedy, University of Toronto; Aaron Smith, Research Specialist, Pew Internet Project; Amy Tracy Wells, Research Fellow, Pew Internet Project; Barry Wellman, University of Toronto

The internet and cell phones have become central components of modern family life. Among all household types, the traditional nuclear family has the highest rate of technology usage and ownership.

A national survey has found that households with a married couple and minor children are more likely than other household types -- such as single adults, homes with unrelated adults, or couples without children to have cell phones and use the internet.

The survey shows that these high rates of technology ownership affect family life. In particular, cell phones allow family members to stay more regularly in touch even when they are not physically together. Moreover, many members of married-with-children households view material online together.

 A small U.S. and German study has found that text messaging may help children fight off obesity by taking advantage of the fact that many youngsters are glued to their cell phones.

Researchers from the University of North Carolina and Germany's University of Heidelberg found text messaging could be used to reduce children's chances of becoming overweight or obese later in life by helping them monitor and modify their behavior.

The study, published in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, involved 58 children aged 5 to 13 and their parents who took part in group education sessions to encourage them to increase physical activity, decrease time spent watching television, and cut back on sugar-sweetened drinks.

The participants were divided into three groups -- one that reported self-monitoring via text messaging, another group with a paper monitoring diary, and a no-monitoring control group.

The study found that children in the text messaging group were far more likely to stick to their goals -- 43 percent -- than those with a paper diary -- 19 percent.

Four out of five parents that use parental control software don't turn it on, despite being concerned about their children's online safety, says McAfee.

Research by the security firm revealed a further 52 percent of parents admitted they never changed the security settings on their parental controls software while 20 percent admitted to being unsure as to whether they level of security. Nearly two thirds of parents also said they hadn't raised the subject of online security with their children.

McAfee highlighted that just under half of parents claim to monitor their children's online activities, however 30 percent said they left their children alone in their bedroom to surf the web. The survey also highlighted that 26 percent of all five to seven year olds have a computer in their bedroom and 17 percent of them are allowed to browse the web.

Meanwhile 46 percent of parent's said they were unaware their children had any social networking profiles on sites such as Facebook.

When it comes to maintaining the family PC, the task tends to fall to dads, with 88 percent of men saying they were responsible for installing and monitoring security software on their home PC. The survey showed that twice as many Dad's compared to Mum's actively seek out information on the latest online threats and 13 percent of mum's claimed their kids were more internet savvy than they were.

Sydney Jones, Research Assistant; Susanna Fox, Associate Director

More teens play online games than visit social networking sites. Also, the number of teens using email has dropped significantly over the past four years.

The new report, Generations Online in 2009, found that despite the commonly held perception that teens live on sites like MySpace and Facebook, 78 percent of teens 12-17 play online games while just 65 percent use social networking sites. Those numbers diverge for the Generation Y found Pew, as just half of adults 18-32 play online games while 67 percent of them are on social networking sites.

Despite the fact that nearly a third of teens are not social networkers, these sites, along with text messaging and instant messaging are quickly shoving aside email as a preferred form of Web communication for this group. Pew’s research found that 73 percent of teens 12-17 use email—still as sizable number--but down considerably from the 89 percent figure recorded in 2005.

"They are moody," Owens said. "Depression is a concern. It affects every aspect of their lives."

The Sleep Foundation poll interviewed 1,602 adult caregivers and their children aged 11 to 17. It had a margin of error of 2.4 percentage points.

Among the findings:

-Nearly all youngsters — 97 percent — have at least one electronic item in their bedroom, such as a television, computer, phone or music device. Adolescents with four or more such items in their bedrooms are much more likely than their peers to get an insufficient amount of sleep at night. They are also almost twice as likely to fall asleep in school and while doing homework, the Foundation reported. Read the full Brief, 03/28/2006

Common Sense Media, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center

In a new, nationally representative poll from Common Sense Media and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center (JGCC), American parents agreed by a wide margin that digital media skills are important to kids’ success in the 21st century, but they also expressed skepticism about whether digital media could contribute to the development of skills like communicating, working with others, and establishing civic responsibility.

Three out of four parents in the survey (75 percent) agreed that knowing how to use digital media is as beneficial for kids as traditional skills like reading and math, and 83 percent of parents said that digital media gives their children the skills they need to succeed in the 21st century.

But parents expressed skepticism about the value of many digital media platforms, particularly when it came to whether digital media could teach kids how to communicate and collaborate, skills that are essential in a 21st-century workforce. For example:

• 67 percent of parents said they did not think the Web helped teach their kids how to communicate.
• 87 percent of parents said they did not believe the Web helped their kids learn how to work with others.
• Three out of four parents do not believe the Web can teach kids to be responsible in their communities.

That\'s according to a broad new national study, called "The Digital Family," released this week by the No. 1 cable network Nickelodeon. The findings are among the first examinations of technology usage in the home, and they\'re part of a wider effort among U.S. researchers to understand how rapidly advancing technology is changing the family structure, as well as the way kids communicate and are educated and entertained.

Nickelodeon, which is owned by MTV Networks, said it conducted extensive research from September 2006 to December 2006, questioning parents of children from infants to 14-year-olds, as well as kids ages 6 to 14 about their usage of television, digital video recorders, video on demand, the Net, cell phones, video games and MP3 players. Research included focus groups, telephone interviews, interviews of pairs of friends and deprivation studies (questioning parents and kids who gave up TV, the Internet and so on). Data from Nielsen Media Research was also incorporated.

Presumably, one key finding for Nickelodeon was that popular new technologies like the Internet are not eating into television\'s influence. The amount of time parents and kids spend watching TV has risen by about two hours weekly since Nickelodeon\'s study in 2002. According to Marsha Williams, senior vice president for research and planning in Nickelodeon\'s Kids and Family Group, that reflects TV\'s role as a relaxation tool, family-bonding device and babysitter.

"The Internet has blurred the lines between work and home. It\'s hard to turn off," said Williams, presenting her research to Hollywood and media executives in Los Angeles on Thursday. So Nickelodeon found in its deprivation study of parents and kids that they missed television most, over the Internet, cell phones or other technology. "They really missed the ability to kick back, unwind and relax your brain." Read the full Brief, 01/25/2007

Much has been made about violent video games and how they impact children over the past decade and legislatures and activist groups alike have tried to find ways to stop them from getting in the hands of minors. And with the help of retailers, most laws have tried to make it impossible for those under the age of 17 to buy an M-rated game. But according to a recent Nielsen survey, 17 percent of Grand Theft Auto IV buyers were underage.

Nielsen found that of the 6,000 respondents, 17 percent of all buyers were younger than 17 -- the children were aged between 6 and 17 -- and of those younger buyers, 61 percent bought the game themselves, while 39 percent had a relative or friend buy it for them. In those cases where someone else bought the game for the kids, 80 percent were the child's parent or guardian and 10 percent said their older siblings bought the game for them.

The study, Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8-18 Year-olds, examined media use among a nationally representative sample of more than 2,000 3rd through 12th graders who completed detailed questionnaires, including nearly 700 self-selected participants who also maintained seven-day media diaries.

The study - which measured recreational (non-school) use of TV and videos, music, video games, computers, movies, and print – found that the total amount of media content young people are exposed to each day has increased by more than an hour over the past five years (from 7:29 to 8:33), with most of the increase coming from video games (up from 0:26 to 0:49) and computers (up from 0:27 to 1:02, excluding school-work). However, because the media use diaries indicate that the amount of time young people spend “media multi-tasking” has increased from 16% to 26% of media time, the actual number of hours devoted to media use has remained steady, at just under 6 ½ hours a day (going from 6:19 to 6:21), or 44 ½ hours a week. For example, one in four (28%) youth say they “often” (10%) or “sometimes” (18%) go online while watching TV to do something related to the show they are watching. Anywhere from a quarter to a third of kids say they are using another media “most of the time” while watching TV (24%), reading (28%), listening to music (33%) or using a computer (33%).

“Kids are multi-tasking and consuming many different kinds of media all at once,” said Drew Altman, Ph.D., President and CEO of the Kaiser Family Foundation. “Multi-tasking is a growing phenomenon in media use and we don’t know whether it’s good or bad or both.”

Media in the bedroom. Children’s bedrooms have increasingly become multi-media centers, raising important issues about supervision and exposure to unlimited content. Two-thirds of all 8-18 year-olds have a TV in their room (68%), and half (49%) have a video game player there. Increasing numbers have a VCR or DVD player (up from 36% to 54%), cable or satellite TV (from 29% to 37%), computer (from 21% to 31%), and Internet access (from 10% to 20%) in their bedroom. Those with a TV in their room spend almost 1½ hours (1:27) more in a typical day watching TV than those without a set in their room. Outside of their bedrooms, in many young people’s homes the TV is a constant companion: nearly two-thirds (63%) say the TV is “usually” on during meals, and half (51%) say they live in homes where the TV is left on “most” or “all” of the time, whether anyone is watching it or not.

Parental rules. While prior studies indicate that parents have strong concerns about children’s exposure to media, about half (53%) of all 8-18 year olds say their families have no rules about TV watching. Forty-six percent say they do have rules, but just 20% say their rules are enforced “most” of the time. The study indicates that parents who impose rules and enforce them do influence the amount of time their children devote to media. Kids with TV rules that are enforced most of the time report two hours less (2:01) daily media exposure than those from homes without rules.

“These kids are spending the equivalent of a full-time work week using media, plus overtime,” said Vicky Rideout, M.A., a Kaiser Family Foundation Vice President who directed the study. “Anything that takes up that much space in their lives certainly deserves our full attention.” Read the full Brief, 03/09/2005

By studying children’s activities over 24-hour periods, Dr. Elizabeth Vandewater and her colleagues provide evidence for the first time that supports the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) television viewing recommendations.

AAP recommends that children under the age of two should not watch television and children older than two should watch no more than two hours of television daily.

“When AAP made these recommendations, we actually knew nothing about how much time infants and toddlers were spending in front of the screen,” says Vandewater, lead author and associate professor of human ecology at The University of Texas at Austin. “Now we know that time spent watching television is negatively related to time spent with parents.”

While television time impinged on familial interactions for all age groups, Vandewater found this to be strongest in older children, ages nine to 12, because they spent less time with their parents overall.

Read the full Brief, 06/16/2006

The study was released on Monday by Insight Research Group and commissioned by Common Sense Media, a San Francisco-based group that studies the impact of media on kids.

Some 57 percent of 1,138 U.S. parents surveyed were either very concerned or strongly concerned about children spending too much of their time with different media outlets. By comparison, about 45 percent of parents said they were as concerned about their kids engaging in sex or using alcohol.

"Intuitively, parents have a sense that too much media isn\'t a good thing, but they can\'t quite put their finger on why," James Steyer, founder and chief executive of Common Sense Media, said in a statement.

Parents also saw themselves as bearing the biggest responsibility for the way media affects their kids, well ahead of the companies that create TV shows or Internet content, who ranked third on the list. Read the full Brief, 02/05/2007

New research shows that exercise video games such as Wii Sports and Dance Dance Revolution boost children's activity levels significantly.

The Wii system, made by Nintendo, is controlled by a wireless remote that translates movements to its "Mii" caricature on screen. In Dance Dance Revolution, from video game maker Konami, players use their feet to hit arrows on the game's dance mat, matching their own steps with arrows set in time to music on screen.

Girls and young women who devote much time to the Internet, get too little sleep or regularly drink alcohol are more likely than their peers to put on excess weight, a new study suggests.The researchers, who followed more than 5,000 girls between 14 and 21 years old for 1 year, found that the more spare time girls spent on the Internet, the more their body mass index (BMI) increased.

Similar patterns were seen when the researchers looked at alcohol consumption and sleep. In the latter case, lack of sleep was linked to greater gains in BMI — a measure of weight in relation to height.

The findings, reported in The Journal of Pediatrics, add to evidence implicating each of these three habits in promoting weight gain.

The effect of each may be small, but over time the pounds can add up, according to the researchers, led by Dr. Catherine S. Berkey of Brigham & Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston.

The study involved 5,036 girls and young women who were surveyed regarding the number of recreational hours per week they spent on the Internet, which ranged from 1 to 5 hours, to 16-plus hours, as well as how long they typically slept each night (anywhere from 5 hours or less, to 9 hours or more) and how much alcohol they usually drank (ranging from none to two or more drinks per week).

In general, the researchers found, as Internet use climbed, so did BMI, particularly among girls younger than 18 years old.

• 65% of children under age six live in a home where the television is on at least half the time.
• 36% live in "heavy" TV households where the TV is on "always" or "most of the time," even if no one is watching.
• 68% of all children under the age of two use TV, computer, video games, or DVD/Videos, and they spend an average of 2 hours per day in front of a screen.
• 43% of children under two watch TV every day.
• 30% of kids aged 0-3 have a TV in their bedroom.
• 43% of kids aged 4-6 have a TV in their bedroom.
• 27% of kids aged 0-6 have a VCR or DVD player in their bedroom.

Kids today have plenty of leisure time, with 2-to-11-year-olds averaging roughly 68 hours a week, and 5-to-12-year-olds averaging 58 hours. Toddling 2-to-4-year-olds are true layabouts, averaging 94 hours of leisure time every week.

The NPD study concurs with a large-scale study of media behaviors among children and teens conducted in 2004 by the Kaiser Family Foundation. In that study, children ages 8 to 18 spent a quarter of their media time multitasking with other media. Children ages 8 to 10 were just as likely to multitask as teens. Read the full Brief, 04/27/2007

Daniel Anderson, Ph.D., University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Daniel Bronfin, M.D., Ochsner Health System, New Orleans

Even if young children aren't watching the TV, it may be distracting them from their play and depriving them of developing critical attention skills, a new study says.

When children aged 3 and younger played in a room with a television on that was tuned to adult programming, they played for about 5 percent less time than when there was no background TV. More importantly, when there was no background TV, the children's play was more focused with longer play episodes, the study found.

"Background TV is a disruptive and distracting influence. Our evidence is that TV keeps the children from sustaining their attention at a time when developmentally, they're beginning to organize their attention skills and sequencing behaviors," said study senior author Daniel Anderson, a professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

"Parents think it [background TV] doesn't matter because the programs aren't directed at children, but just because a child isn't paying active attention doesn't mean it doesn't have a disruptive effect," he added.

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommends that children 2 years old and younger be exposed to no screen time. For older children, the AAP suggests limiting screen time -- including TV, video games and computer use -- to one to two hours a day of active viewing time. Guidelines haven't specifically addressed background TV. d Medical School in Boston.

• The average child aged 8-18 uses about 47 hours of media per week.
  (source: The Kaiser Family Foundation, Kids & Media @ The New Millennium, November 1999.)
• Children under age six spend as much time consuming \'screen media\' (1:58) as outside playing (2:02).
  (source: Kaiser Family Foundation, Children and Electronic Media, October 2003.)

• A pre-schooler\'s risk of obesity jumps 6% for every hour of TV they watch. If that child had a TV in his or her bedroom, the odds of being overweight jumped an additional 31% for every hour watched.
  (source: Dennison MD, Barbara A., Erb MS, Tara A., and Jenkins PhD, Paul L. (2002, June). Television viewing and television in bedroom associated with overweight risk among low-income preschool children. Pediatrics, 109, 1028-1035.)

• Movies account for 52% of all new adolescent smokers.
  (source: Dr. Stanley Glantz, University of California—San Francisco, First-Run Smoking Presentations in U.S. Movies 1999-2003, SmokeFree Movies.)
• 80% of all PG-13 movies and 50% of all G/PG movies depict smoking.
  (source: Dr. Stanley Glantz, University of California—San Francisco, First-Run Smoking Presentations in U.S. Movies 1999-2003, SmokeFree Movies.)
• Time Warner movies tempt 98,000 kids into picking up smoking every year, while Disney tempts 66,000 kids.
  (source: Dr. Stanley Glantz, University of California—San Francisco, First-Run Smoking Presentations in U.S. Movies 1999-2003, SmokeFree Movies.)

• By the time an average child reaches age 18, s/he will have seen 200,000 acts of violence and 40,000 murders.
  (source: Huston, A.C. et al (1992). Big world, small screen: The role of television in American society, cited at www.mediafamily.org)
• Violence is more likely to occur in children’s television shows (69%) than is non-children’s shows (58%).
  (source: Barbara Wilson, et al, "Violence in Children\'s Television Programming: Assessing The Risks", Journal of Communications 52 (2002): 52-5.)
• 64% of all TV shows contain violent content.
  (source: National Television Violence Study, Center for Communications and Social Policy, University of California at Santa Barbara, volume 3 1998.)
• Over 1,000 clinical studies have shown a link between media violence and physical violence.
  (source: "Media Violence," AAP Committee on Communications, in Pediatrics, Vol. 95, No. 6, June 1995.)
• Reducing TV and video game consumption to under one hour/day decreases verbal aggression by 50% and physical aggression by 40% among 3rd and 4th graders.
  (source: Dr. Thomas Robinson, Stanford University, Pediatric Adolescent Med. 2001;155:17-23.)

• 64% of TV shows (excluding news, sports, and \'kids\') contain overtly sexual content.
  (source: Kaiser Family Foundation, Sex on Television 3: Content and Context, 2003)

• 64% of characters in top-selling video games are male, 17% are female and 19% are non-human.
  (source: Children Now, Fair Play: Violence, Gender & Race in Video Games, 2001.)

• The average child sees 40,000 television commercials each year.
  (source: Professor Dale Kunkel in The Handbook of Children and Media, 2001.)

According to a study released this week, Americans aged 13 to 18 spend more than 72 hours a week using electronic media--defined as the Internet, cell phones, television, music and video games. Because teens are known for multitasking, their usage of devices can overlap.

So much technology makes teens feel they are playing a starring role in their own reality TV show, said Jim Taylor, vice chairman of the Harrison Group, which conducted the 2006 Teen Trend study.

"This generation is unique," Taylor said. "Teen life has become a theatrical, self-directed media production."

The Harrison Group, whose 2006 Teen Trends study was sponsored by VNU Business Media, surveyed 1,000 Americans aged 13 to 18 on their thoughts and habits, to extrapolate trends for the estimated 25.2 million teens in the United States. This is the third year of the study.

Depending on the circumstances, these harassing or "cyberbullying" behaviors may be truly threatening, merely annoying or relatively benign. But several patterns are clear: girls are more likely than boys to be targets; and teens who share their identities and thoughts online are more likely to be targets than those who lead less active online lives.Read the full Brief, 06/27/2007

Jaana Juvonen, University of California--Los Angeles

Nearly three in four teenagers say they were bullied online at least once during a recent 12-month period, and only one in 10 reported such cyber-bullying to parents or other adults, according to a new study by UCLA psychologists.

Of those who were bullied online, 85 percent also have been bullied at school, the psychologists found. The probability of getting bullied online was substantially higher for those who have been the victims of school bullying.

"Bullying affects millions of students and is not limited to school grounds," said lead study author Jaana Juvonen, a professor of psychology and chair of UCLA's developmental psychology program. "Bullying on the Internet looks similar to what kids do face-to-face in school. The Internet is not functioning as a separate environment but is connected with the social lives of kids in school. Our findings suggest that especially among heavy users of the Internet, cyber-bullying is a common experience, and the forms of online and in-school bullying are more alike than different."
 
The research is based on an anonymous Web-based survey of 1,454 participants between the ages of 12 and 17, who were recruited through a nationally popular teen website from August through October 2005. The psychologists' findings appear in the September issue of the Journal of School Health.

Forty-one percent of the teenagers surveyed reported between one and three online bullying incidents over the course of a year, 13 percent reported four to six incidents and 19 percent reported seven or more incidents, Juvonen said.

A survey of young people aged 15 to 26 found that for each additional alcohol advertisement viewed per month, there followed a 1 percent rise in the average number of drinks consumed, said study author Leslie Snyder of the University of Connecticut in Storrs.

The study\'s findings counter industry arguments that only adult drinkers heed alcohol advertising, Snyder wrote in the journal Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.

In the study -- released around the New Year\'s holiday that is often associated with toasts and excessive imbibing -- the researchers conducted four rounds of interviews between 1999 and 2001 with a group of young people, with the initial 1,872 subjects selected randomly.

Another finding was that for each additional dollar spent per capita on alcohol advertising in a particular media market, study participants drank 3 percent more per month.

In markets with heavy alcohol advertising of more than $10 per capita per month, alcohol consumption increased over time and reached a peak of 50 drinks per month by age 25.

The study measured advertising exposure on each of four media: television, radio, magazines and billboards.

"The results also contradict claims that advertising is unrelated to youth drinking amounts: that advertising at best causes brand switching, only affects those older than the legal drinking age or is effectively countered by current educational efforts," Snyder wrote.

In an editorial in the journal, David Jernigan of Georgetown University in Washington said the study was the first of its kind to link young people\'s alcohol use directly to objective measures of industry spending on advertising.

The study "calls into question the industry\'s argument that its roughly $1.8 billion in measured media expenditures per year have no impact on underage drinking," he wrote.

Snyder doubted whether the industry was heeding voluntary guidelines that 70 percent of the audience for its advertising be at least 21 years old, the legal drinking age.

--Reuters Monday, January 2, 2006 Read the full Brief, 01/05/2006

Although adults may not notice Hollywood`s culture of drinking, a new study suggests it may be going right to the heads of adolescent movie watchers, causing them to try alcohol as early as 12 years old.

\'When kids start a behavior, part of the reason is it`s a result of seeing people model (that behavior) in the environment,\' said James D. Sargent, a professor of pediatrics at Dartmouth Medical School and the study`s lead author. \'Now, we`ve extended the environment to include friends, parents and personas we get to know through the movies.\'

The study, published in the new Journal of Studies on Alcohol, is the first evidence of a connection between exposure to alcohol in movies and early onset teen drinking.

In 1999 Sargent and colleagues surveyed more than 5,000 students between the ages of 10 to 14, asking them the number of movies they watch regularly and if they experimented with drinking. The students were then asked whether they had seen any of a random list of 50 movies, selected from a bank of 600 contemporary and popular films. Researchers also noted other factors such as class performance, gender and personality.

In 2001 researchers re-interviewed the children who had reported not drinking at the start of the study and found that those children highly exposed to alcohol in movies were more likely to drink earlier. For example, of the initial non-drinkers, nearly 15 percent had tried alcohol.

The average child was exposed to at least eight hours of alcohol use from the sample of 600 movies.

Nearly all the movies sampled, 92 percent, depicted alcohol use of some kind, Sargent found. Only one-third of the films discouraged drinking as dangerous; in 43 percent of the films, drinking was portrayed as a positive experience.

Sargent described a scene of drunken revelry at a wedding reception in the 2005 movie \'Wedding Crashers\' as typical of wild party plots in films.

\'It`s pervasive,\' said Sargent, who has studied the effect of media on youths for 10 years. \'Once you start paying attention to it, almost anytime a man and woman socialize, they socialize over a drink. Bar scenes and party scenes are frequent.\'

The link between cigarette smoking in movies and teen smoking is already established, so Sargent expected to see this connection between drinking and movies. Kids also begin to smoke and drink at the same age, between 10 and 15. Around 40 percent of 14-year-olds drink, Sargent said, although that number does not seem to be rising.

Although adolescents are often wary of advertisements, they may not recognize that movies are working in a similar, yet subtler, fashion. People put their guards down when watching movies, Sargent said, by keeping their senses open and letting the movie wash over them.

\'I don`t think (kids) approach the viewing of movies with the same skepticism -- it`s just a sensory experience, and those kind of messages are easier to click,\' Sargent said.

So, what`s a parent to do? Monitor the media children access, he said. That can mean controlling what programs kids can watch on TV with a V-chip. The V-chip, a federally mandated device in TVs with larger than 13-inch screens, allows parents to assess rated programs and then block particular shows inappropriate for children. Sargent also suggested limiting children to one movie a week and barring films rated R. On average, kids already spend five to seven hours a day consuming some form of media, the study pointed out.

But with the proliferation of so many forms of media, and with the busy 9-to-5 lifestyle of many households, parents may have a tougher time keeping track of what their children are up to.

\'The sense I get from parents is they are just overwhelmed,\' Sargent said. \'Lots of times their kids know more about the TV than they do.\'

--M&C News, January 19, 2006Read the full Brief, 01/19/2006

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Nearly half of all U.S. high-school students admit to recently drinking alcohol illegally, and most of them were binge drinkers, according to a government survey published on Tuesday.

These binge drinkers -- who had five or more drinks in a row -- were more likely to have sex, fight, smoke or use drugs, the study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found.

"Our study clearly shows that it\'s not just that students drink alcohol, but how much they drink that most strongly affects whether they experience other health and social problems," said Dr. Jacqueline Miller of the CDC\'s Alcohol Team, who led the study.

"It also underscores the importance of implementing effective strategies to prevent underage and binge drinking, such as enforcing the minimum legal drinking age and reducing alcohol marketing to youth, which can help us change social norms regarding the acceptability of underage and binge drinking." Read the full Brief, 01/02/2007

Public Health and safety officials have become alarmed by the newest entry into the world of alcoholic beverages. Alcoholic energy drinks are prepackaged beverages that contain not only alcohol but also caffeine and other stimulants. Earlier this year, 29 state attorneys general signed a letter to Anheuser-Busch expressing their concern about Spykes, an alcoholic energy drink packaged in colorful 2-ounce bottles with obvious appeal to youth. The objections of law enforcement officials as well as parents and leading public health organizations caused Anheuser-Busch to pull Spykes from the market. But the story does not end there. Many alcoholic drinks are still on the market.Read the full Brief, 07/01/2007

Correctly taxing alcopops in California could:

• Save the lives of 21 youth each year
• Save $437 million each year
• Reduce underage alcopop consumption by 35 percent

Alcopops are sweetened alcoholic beverages that are often bubbly and fruit-flavored, and resemble soda or other soft drinks. While these products derive much of their alcohol from distilled spirits (and are often branded with spirit names such as "Smirnoff Ice"), industry calls them "flavored malt beverages," because that makes them sound like beer, which keeps their taxes low.

Thanks to a government petition filed by California Firday Night Live Partnerships and California Youth Council, two youth groups, the state is currently considering reclassifying alcopops as distilled spirits. Marin Institute undertook this original data analysis to calculate the true cost of alcopops in California, both in terms of lives and money. We emphasize the critical policy reason for taxing alcopops at the higher distilled spirits rate. We also estimate how much money industry generates from underage alcopop consumption. Finally, we describe how other countries are taxing alcopops significantly higher, with extremely positive results.Read the full Brief, 07/01/2007

Girls and young women who devote much time to the Internet, get too little sleep or regularly drink alcohol are more likely than their peers to put on excess weight, a new study suggests.The researchers, who followed more than 5,000 girls between 14 and 21 years old for 1 year, found that the more spare time girls spent on the Internet, the more their body mass index (BMI) increased.

Similar patterns were seen when the researchers looked at alcohol consumption and sleep. In the latter case, lack of sleep was linked to greater gains in BMI — a measure of weight in relation to height.

The findings, reported in The Journal of Pediatrics, add to evidence implicating each of these three habits in promoting weight gain.

The effect of each may be small, but over time the pounds can add up, according to the researchers, led by Dr. Catherine S. Berkey of Brigham & Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston.

The study involved 5,036 girls and young women who were surveyed regarding the number of recreational hours per week they spent on the Internet, which ranged from 1 to 5 hours, to 16-plus hours, as well as how long they typically slept each night (anywhere from 5 hours or less, to 9 hours or more) and how much alcohol they usually drank (ranging from none to two or more drinks per week).

In general, the researchers found, as Internet use climbed, so did BMI, particularly among girls younger than 18 years old.

“This is a dangerous situation. For the first time, we have hard evidence that millions of kids are buying alcohol online and that the Internet is fast becoming a high-tech, low-risk way for kids to get beer, wine and liquor delivered to their home with no ID check,” WSWA Chairman Stan Hastings said. “This landmark data is alarming because state legislatures are rushing to allow wine and other online alcohol sales at a time we know regulatory agencies are telling us they are unable to monitor these types of sales because they lack manpower and resources.”

TRU RESEARCH
A new survey conducted by Teenage Research Unlimited (TRU)* confirms that a significant number of teens purchase beer, wine and liquor online. Specifically, TRU’s survey of 14- to 20-year-olds confirms:

3.1 million minors (12%) ages 14-20 report having a friend who has ordered alcohol online.
Two percent (551,000) of those ages 14-20 say they personally have bought alcohol online.
As exposure and awareness of buying alcohol online increase, even more minors can be expected to purchase wine, beer and liquor online. This is consistent with a 2003 National Academy of Sciences report which confirmed kids are buying alcohol online and that increasing use of the Internet will make this problem worse in the future. Nearly one in 10 (9%) of those ages 14-20 have visited a site that sells alcohol.
One-third – nearly 8.9 million ages 14-20 nationwide – are open to the possibility of an online alcohol purchase before age 21.
Seventy-five percent say their parents aren’t able to control what they do on the Internet.
Among those ages 14-20 who have tried alcohol, 75% tried liquor, followed by wine at 64%, beer at 60% and wine coolers at 55%.
Read the full Brief, 08/24/2006

Megan A. Moreno, Dimitri A. Christakis, et al.

Scientists at Seattle Children's Research Institute and the University of Washington randomly selected 500 MySpace profiles belonging to self-described 18-year-olds in the U.S. to determine what sort of information the average teen was sharing online. Their conclusion? The kids are not alright. Well, half of them anyways. Nearly 54% of the selected profiles revealed details about risky sexual lifestyles, drug addictions and violent encounters with peers.

A new survey of Washington students shows most are making good choices about their health. Still, far too many regularly use alcohol, tobacco, drugs, and engage in risky behavior.

The Healthy Youth Survey focuses on health risk behaviors. The anonymous voluntary survey is taken every two years by more than 210,000 public school kids around the state in grades six, eight, 10, and 12. I

Some specific findings of the survey include:

- Among 8th-graders, 41 percent who drink alcohol say they get it from home, and about 24 percent say their parents haven't talked with them about alcohol and its risks.
- Seven percent of 8th and 10th-graders gambled at least once a month in the past year.
- Fewer students in grades 6, 8, and 12 say they enjoy being at school than in 2006. About one in five 8th-graders report skipping school in the past month.
- About 8 percent of 8th and 10th-graders have been a member of a gang during the past year.
- Among 6th-graders who sometimes feel sad or hopeless, about one in four say they do not have or are not sure if they have an adult in their life to talk to when they feel sad.
 - About 9 percent of 10th-graders report they tried to commit suicide in the past year, which is a similar rate to recent years.
- Only about 70 percent of 10th-graders say they always wear a seat belt -- similar to 2006.

White teenagers who are the most avid watchers of R-rated movies or who have television sets in their bedrooms are more than twice as likely to take up smoking compared with white teens who don\'t, according to a report published today.

Experts said the study confirmed Hollywood\'s pervasive influence by showing that even when other risk factors — such as peer smoking — were taken into account, media exposure remained a powerful force on white children.

The report also found that although African American teens watched more R-rated movies than their white classmates and were more likely to have their own TVs, their rate of smoking wasn\'t linked to their viewing habits.

"Why is it that whites are responsive to this and blacks aren\'t? What\'s going on?" asked Dr. James Sargent, a professor of pediatrics at Dartmouth Medical School who studies teen smoking but wasn\'t involved in the report.

Other researchers have documented a broad link between media exposure and teen smoking, but the new study, published in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, is the first to demonstrate that the effect isn\'t universal.

Christine Jackson, a social ecologist at the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation in Chapel Hill, N.C., and colleagues from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill interviewed 382 white students and 353 black students from the central part of the state in spring 2002.

At the time, the students were 12 to 14 years old, and none had tried a cigarette.

Two years later, 34% of the black teens had started smoking, as had 27% of the white teens.

As Jackson had anticipated, the biggest factors were having best friends who smoked, being a thrill-seeker and having inattentive parents.

But she found that for white teens, high exposure to R-rated movies made them 2.7 times as likely to start smoking. Having a TV in their bedroom made them 2.2 times as likely to take up the habit.

"As a researcher and a parent, I believe that teens are influenced by a variety of things they view in movies, including smoking," said Madeline Dalton, director of the Hood Center for Children and Families at Dartmouth Medical School, who was not involved in the research.

Virtually every R-rated movie released from 1988 to 1997 portrayed favorable images of smoking, according to a 2002 study by Dalton, Sargent and other researchers.Read the full Brief, 03/06/2007

The study, described as the first national look at the influence of movie smoking on youths, urged Hollywood to cut back on depictions of smoking or shots of cigarette brands.

The industry also should consider adding a mention of smoking to movie rating data that now mention explicit sex, violence and profanity, it said.

Researchers at Dartmouth Medical School asked 6,522 children aged 10 to 14 to identify films they had seen from a list of 50 randomly selected box office hits released in the United States from 1998 to 2000.

Even after considering other factors known to influence smoking, the study found that adolescents with the highest exposure to movie smoking were 2.6 times more likely to try it compared to those with the lowest exposure.

Of every 100 adolescents who tried smoking, 38 did so because they saw smoking portrayed in movies, said the report published in the November issue of Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

In the entire sample, about 10 percent had tried smoking, according to the study paid for by the National Cancer Institute.

"Part of the reason that exposure to movie smoking has such a considerable impact on adolescent smoking is because it is a very strong social influence on kids ages 10-14," said James Sargent, a pediatrics professor at the school and lead author of the study.

"Because movie exposure to smoking is so pervasive, its impact on this age group outweighs whether peers or parents smoke or whether the child is involved in other activities, like sports," he added.

The authors said their research confirms findings published last year based on a study of teens living primarily in rural areas of New England.

"This is an extremely powerful confirmatory study that shows that kids react the same way to the movies in other places in the United States as they do in New England," said Sargent. "It means that no child is immune to the influence of smoking in movies."

A U.S. government survey released in March showed 22.3 percent of high school students and 8.1 percent of middle school students said they smoked cigarettes in 2004.

By Michael ConlonRead the full Brief, 11/07/2005

Brian Primack, M.D., Ed.M., University of Pittsburgh Medical School; Renee  Hobbs, Ed.D, Temple University

Adolescents who are skilled in interpreting media messages about tobacco may be less likely to smoke and less likely to start smoking in the future, according to a new study by University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine researchers. The report is now online in the American Journal of Health Behavior.

In this study, researchers assessed the media literacy of more than 1,200 adolescents. Media literacy is defined as the ability to understand, analyze and evaluate media messages in a wide variety of forms. Building on previous research, the study focused on determining associations between smoking outcomes and particular types of media literacy.

“Of the 442,000 people who die from smoking each year, the majority began smoking at age 18 or younger, and we know from our prior research that media exposure to smoking contributes strongly to the initiation of the habit in adolescents,” said Brian Primack, M.D., Ed.M., assistant professor of medicine and pediatrics at Pitt’s School of Medicine and lead author of the study. “In addition to attempting to change the way smoking is portrayed in the media, we can, as educators, develop innovative and effective ways to help young people analyze and interpret the smoking-related messages they see in the media. This research could help to focus those efforts.”

This information comes on the heels of the July 7th announcement from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, which cited information from a previous study indicating that after decades of decline, smoking in the movies increased rapidly in the early 1990s and – by the year 2002 -- was back to levels last seen in 1950.

“This news is a wake-up call to public health officials and other leaders,” said American Legacy Foundation® President and CEO, Dr. Cheryl Healton. “We have seen a downward ‘ratings creep,’ in which studios are shifting depictions of smoking into teen-rated films, and research continues to prove the link between young people seeing smoking in movies and starting to smoke.” Teen-rated films are those movies earning G, PG and PG-13 ratings. Read the full Brief, 08/09/2006

A new survey of Washington students shows most are making good choices about their health. Still, far too many regularly use alcohol, tobacco, drugs, and engage in risky behavior.

The Healthy Youth Survey focuses on health risk behaviors. The anonymous voluntary survey is taken every two years by more than 210,000 public school kids around the state in grades six, eight, 10, and 12. I

Some specific findings of the survey include:

- Among 8th-graders, 41 percent who drink alcohol say they get it from home, and about 24 percent say their parents haven't talked with them about alcohol and its risks.
- Seven percent of 8th and 10th-graders gambled at least once a month in the past year.
- Fewer students in grades 6, 8, and 12 say they enjoy being at school than in 2006. About one in five 8th-graders report skipping school in the past month.
- About 8 percent of 8th and 10th-graders have been a member of a gang during the past year.
- Among 6th-graders who sometimes feel sad or hopeless, about one in four say they do not have or are not sure if they have an adult in their life to talk to when they feel sad.
 - About 9 percent of 10th-graders report they tried to commit suicide in the past year, which is a similar rate to recent years.
- Only about 70 percent of 10th-graders say they always wear a seat belt -- similar to 2006.

"We are trying to demonstrate to people how massive the exposure is," said Dr. James Sargent, professor of pediatrics at Dartmouth Medical School. "Movies deliver billions of images of smoking to young people when they\'re very vulnerable to that message," he said.

While researchers haven\'t been able to confirm a cause-and-effect link between smoking in movies and smoking among children, many anti-tobacco activists assume there\'s a connection.

Indeed, research suggests that kids who watch movies that highlight smoking are more likely to smoke themselves, even when other factors are taken into account. Sargent has estimated that movies are responsible for about a third to 40 percent of all teen smoking.

In the new study, the Dartmouth team examined the incidents of tobacco use in 534 hit movies from 1998 to the first four months of 2003. Then, in a survey of more than 6,500 adolescents aged 10 to 14, they determined how many kids had seen those films.Read the full Brief, 05/08/2007

Obesity or being overweight is seen as the most important health issue for U.S. children, according to a new poll commissioned by Research America and the Endocrine Society.

More than a quarter of Americans (27 percent) named obesity as the top health issue for kids, followed by lack of health care/insurance (16 percent) and nutrition/unhealthy diet (9 percent).

Americans are divided on whether addressing obesity is an individual or societal issue.

According to the poll, 52 percent think obesity is a public health issue that society should help solve; 46 percent say it is a private issue that people should deal with on their own.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Kids don\'t run outside and play like they used to, and parents say being a couch potato is a major culprit in the growing problem of childhood obesity in the United States.

Lack of exercise edged out easy access to junk food as the main concern of the 21 percent of parents who conceded in an AP-KOL poll that their children are overweight. KOL is the kids\' service of Internet service provider America Online.

Parents\' big frustration is how to change sedentary habits.

"What do kids like to do other than hang out with their friends?" asks Kim Nethery of Crestwood, Kentucky, who has tried fruitlessly to find a physical activity her 15-year-old daughter will do. Even a walk is difficult, because the family lives on a high-traffic country road risky for pedestrians.

Parents also fret over improving children\'s eating habits. More than half cited the cost of healthy food and television commercials and food packaging as at least a minor problem, according to the poll conducted by Ipsos for The Associated Press and KOL. Another issue: food served in school cafeterias.

Her son\'s middle school lets him order lunch a la carte, complained Margaret Gunderson of Loveland, Colorado.

"They\'re ordering pizza, ice cream. They blow through their lunch money by Tuesday," she said.

The U.S. government counts 9 million children ages 6 to 16 who are overweight, at increased risk for diabetes and other health problems, not to mention being teased by peers or left out of fun activities. Overweight children usually grow into overweight adults.

In the survey, children whose parents earned less than $50,000 a year were a little more likely to be overweight than those from more affluent families.

Children are supposed to get at least an hour of vigorous activity a day. But research shows far too few get anywhere close.

More than half the parents surveyed said their children had expressed a desire to exercise more, and 30 percent said their child wanted to lose weight.

Jeff Chabot, an engineer from Rutland, Vermont, said he encourages his children to participate in outdoor activities like snowmobiling and skiing.

Chabot said his older son is a little heavy. "Junk food is a big temptation," he said. "There\'s a temptation to park himself on the couch and eat after school."

Between heavy traffic that hinders bike-riding and easy access to video games, "children\'s forms of entertainment are much less active than the entertainment we had growing up," said teacher Dierde Karcher of Montclair, New Jersey.

Reducing time spent in front of television and computers has been proven to slow children\'s weight gain.

"We as parents need to do more," said Elena Penson, a sales clerk from Lufkin, Texas, whose family makes a point of going to a park twice a week to play catch. "But when we get home, we\'re tired, too. We\'ve gotten lazy."

The AP-KOL poll of 961 parents of children between ages 6-17 was conducted from Oct. 5-23 and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

-Associated Press, 11/4/05 Read the full Brief, 11/04/2005

Harvey Anderson, University of Toronto

Everyone knows what too much television can do to the mind and what too little exercise can do to the body, but a Canadian study has now shown that the boob tube can also lead to an increase in how much we eat.

Studying childhood obesity, University of Toronto nutritionist Harvey Anderson found that kids who watched TV while eating lunch took in 228 extra calories than those who ate without the television on.

"One of Anderson's conclusions is that eating while watching television overrides our ability to know when to stop eating," the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, which funded the study, said on Tuesday.

"In effect, mindless television watching produces mindless eating. ... Anderson has some immediate advice for parents — turn the television off during mealtime."

As the new school year begins, many parents with overweight and obese children are worried about how their kids will be treated by other students on the playground and in the classroom.

Bullying is a major concern among parents with overweight and obese children ages 6 to13, and these parents are much more likely than parents with healthy weight children to rate bullying as a top health issue for kids, according to a report released today by the University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health.

“We found that parents with overweight or obese children actually view bullying as a greater problem than childhood obesity,” says Matthew M. Davis, M.D., M.A.P.P., director of the National Poll on Children’s Health. “Since bullying is known to be a problem for children with increased weight, bullying prevention programs will need to be mindful of obesity as a potential trigger for bullying behavior, and of parents’ concerns surrounding this issue.”

And parents aren’t taking childhood obesity lightly. The National Poll on Children’s Health recently reported that parents across the country now rank childhood obesity as their No. 1 health concern for kids.

While parents are having discussions with their children about limiting junk food, time spent watching TV and videos, and playing computer games, the latest National Poll on Children’s Health report reveals that only about two-thirds of parents with overweight or obese children actually enforce such limits. Regardless, Davis says talking with your child about making healthier diets and increased physical activity is still a very important first step in setting the stage for a healthier lifestyle.

MONDAY, Dec. 4 (HealthDay News) -- Children and adolescents are being bombarded by so many ads that medical experts now fear for their health. Some 40,000 ads a year from television alone may be boosting obesity, poor nutrition and cigarette and alcohol use among U.S. youth, according to a revised statement from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).

The statement, which appears in the December issue of Pediatrics, calls for more media education to counter some of advertising\'s negative effects.

"We\'re pleading with pediatricians and parents to become aware that consumeristic tendencies are being fed right from birth," said Dr. Donald Shifrin, chairman of the AAP Committee on Communications, which issued the statement, and a pediatrician in private practice in Seattle. "We have to understand that youngsters under a certain age cannot differentiate between a commercial and a program. To them, it\'s real. There should be some effort on the part of parents to point out that this is a commercial."

Researchers from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health examined the prevalence of abnormally high blood sugar levels after several hours without eating, a condition called impaired fasting glucose, or IFG, that is measured in a blood test.

One in 14 boys and girls in a nationally representative sample had the condition. Among the overweight adolescents, it was one in six.

Affected adolescents were more likely than those with normal fasting glucose measurements to have other symptoms suggesting they might be on the road to heart problems: Average levels of bad cholesterol and blood fats called triglycerides were higher in youngsters who had the pre-diabetic condition.

“The numbers are definitely concerning,” said co-author Dr. Venkat Narayan, a CDC diabetes researcher.

The study appears in November’s Pediatrics, being published Monday. It is based on data involving 915 youngsters who participated in a 1999-2000 national health survey. Narayan said the researchers will examine whether rates of pre-diabetes have increased since then.

About 20 million Americans have diabetes, most of them adults with type 2 diabetes, which impairs the body’s ability to properly use the blood sugar-regulating hormone insulin. This form of the disease is strongly linked to being overweight and inactive.

More Type 2 diabetes among youths.

Of the roughly 177,000 Americans under age 20 with diabetes, most have type 1, or juvenile onset diabetes, in which the body produces little or no insulin. But type 2 diabetes among youngsters has increased.

Dr. Francine Kaufman, head of the diabetes center at Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles, said about 25 percent of the diabetic children treated there have type 2 diabetes, compared with just 4 percent a decade ago.

Both types involve abnormally high blood sugar levels that can damage blood vessels, the heart and other organs.

For the study, the researchers used American Diabetes Association criteria that defines impaired fasting glucose as blood sugar levels of at least 100 milligrams per deciliter; above 125 is considered diabetes.

The average level was 89.7, within the normal range, but 7 percent of the children in the study were in the pre-diabetic range, translating to about 2 million U.S. youngsters. Roughly 16 percent of the youngsters studied were obese, about the same as recent national estimates.

‘Lifestyle interventions’

Elevated fasting glucose “has no symptoms but it signifies an advanced metabolic problem, which will in most cases progress to type 2 diabetes over time,” said Dr. David Ludwig, director of the obesity program at Children’s Hospital in Boston, who was not involved in the study.

“Intensive lifestyle interventions” including physical activity and improving diet can help prevent pre-diabetes from progressing in adults and it’s likely the same can happen in children, the researchers said.

Ludwig said systematic societal changes are needed, too, including more healthful school lunches. “It’s just not enough to tell people to exercise and eat right,” he said.

-Associated Press, 11/7/05 Read the full Brief, 11/07/2005

By the time they reach the age of 3, more than one-third of low-income urban children are already overweight or obese, according to a study released yesterday that provides alarming evidence that the nation\'s battle of the bulge begins when toddlers are barely out of diapers.

Researchers armed with scales and measuring devices visited nearly 2,000 families in 20 US cities, including Boston, and evaluated the weight and height of 3-year-olds in an unprecedented effort to focus on obesity among the nation\'s most vulnerable children.

Their finding: 35 percent of the low-income 3-year-olds were overweight or obese, a result more than twice the national rate for obesity among preschool children of all income levels and racial groups. Low-income Hispanic children, the researchers reported in the on line version of the American Journal of Public Health , were the most likely of all to have a weight problem, with 44 percent of those toddlers overweight or obese. Read the full Brief, 01/02/2007

Among the many digital marketing examples cited in the 98-page report are the following:

• To “create a compelling way to connect with the younger demographic,” 600 McDonald’s restaurants in California launched a mobile marketing campaign, urging young cell phone users to text-message to a special phone number to receive an instant electronic coupon for a free McFlurry dessert.

• Coca-Cola’s “My Coke Rewards” program offers special codes in its products that enable young people to access a website, where they can earn such rewards as downloadable ring tones and “amazing sports and entertainment experiences.” This technique is part of a strategy for behavioral profiling, where marketers compile a detailed profile of each customer, including demographic data, purchasing behavior, responses to advertising messages, and even the extent and nature of social networks.

• Food marketers are commercializing online communities by aggressively moving into MySpace and other social networking sites. One technique is to create “branded profiles” that invite children and teens to become “friends” with popular spokescharacters. “Welcome to the King’s Court,” beckons the Burger King MySpace profile. “The virtual home of the Burger King. He’s giving away free episodes of the Fox shows ‘24,’ ‘Pinks,’ and ‘First Friend.’

The study, Food for Thought: Television Food Advertising to Children in the United States, combines content analysis of TV ads with detailed data about children’s viewing habits, to provide an estimate of the number and type of TV ads seen by children of various ages. The study found that tweens ages 8-12 see the most food ads on TV, an average of 21 ads a day, or more than 7,600 a year. Teenagers see slightly fewer ads, at 17 a day, for a total of more than 6,000 a year. For a variety of reasons -- because they watch less TV overall, and more of their viewing is on networks that have limited or no advertising, such as PBS and Disney -- children ages 2-7 see the least number of food ads, at 12 food ads a day, or 4,400 a year.

For each age group studied, food was the top product seen advertised. Thirty-two percent of all ads seen by 2-7 year olds were for food, while 25% of ads seen by 8-12 year olds and 22% of ads seen by 13-17 year olds were for food. Of all genres on TV, shows specifically designed for children under 12 have the highest proportion of food advertising (50% of all ad time).Read the full Brief, 03/28/2007

A new study published in the January issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association surveyed more than 8,000 children between kindergarten and third grade to identify factors associated with the children\'s weight.

The researchers classified the children into one of three groups: those who were not overweight in kindergarten and first grade, but were overweight by third grade; those who became overweight during kindergarten and remained overweight through third grade; and those who were never overweight.

The researchers found that the children who watched more television and ate fewer family meals were more likely to be overweight by first grade. Those who watched more television, ate fewer family meals and lived in neighborhoods perceived by their parents as less safe for outdoor play were more likely to be overweight from kindergarten on. Read the full Brief, 01/12/2007

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — For young Americans, the “food landscape” in television advertising is packed with junk food, according to a new study.

The study by researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is the first to explore the nutritional composition of foods advertised to children using Nutrition Facts labeling.

Nutrient-poor high-sugar foods – candy, sweets and soft drinks – dominate (nearly 44 percent) the foods advertised during the TV programs children ages 6 to 11 watch most, the analysis found. Convenience/fast foods made up 34.2 percent of the advertisements during the programs.

There are not yet any recommended daily values (RDVs) for sugar, but these two groups of foods “exceed the RDVs of fat, saturated fat and sodium, and fail to provide the RDVs of fiber and certain vitamins and minerals,” said Kristen Harrison, the lead author of the study.

A 2,000-calorie-a-day diet of foods in the child-audience ads “would exceed the RDV for sodium and provide nearly a cup of sugar,” said Harrison, a professor of speech communication at Illinois and an expert on media effects on children and adolescents.

“How many kids actually eat a diet like that, I can’t say,” she said. “But it’s important to note that this is the nutritional composition of the diet being marketed to kids and their families, and research shows that the more they are exposed to such advertising, the more likely they are to buy the advertised foods. So, heavy TV viewers probably follow a diet more similar to the TV-advertised diet than do lighter viewers.”

Given the food industry’s heavy marketing of convenience/fast foods and other refined, high-calorie products, Harrison said, “It is becoming increasingly difficult for parents to maintain the moderation necessary to preserve their children’s health.”

Findings of the study appear in the September issue of the American Journal of Public Health in an article titled “Nutritional Content of Foods Advertised During the Television Programs Children Watch Most.” Harrison’s co-author was Amy Marske, a graduate student at the time of the study and now a high school teacher in Chicago.

Other findings:

• Snack-time eating in TV advertising is depicted more often than breakfast, lunch and dinner combined. More than half of all eating is depicted in locations “rarely associated with mealtime eating” such as in cars or outdoors.

• Junk-food ads dominated, with far fewer ads for breads and cereals. The ads offered “little representation” of fruits and vegetables, dairy foods, meats, poultry and fish.

• Child actors’ body size was unrelated to their eating behavior, “suggesting, erroneously, that eating and body weight are not related,” Harrison said.

• Most ads featured no health-related messages. Of the few that did, the most common message was that advertised foods contained “some natural ingredients.”

Harrison and Marske also evaluated the nutritional content of food advertised to adults during the most popular TV shows. They found that those ads were dominated (57.1 percent) by convenience/fast foods, fat and sodium.

“An individual eating a 2,000-calorie diet composed of the general-audience foods would consume considerably more than the RDVs of fat, saturated fat and sodium, while ingesting only a fraction of the RDVs of fiber, vitamin C, calcium and iron.”

Harrison said kids’ consumption of TV ads that tout poor food choices is especially troubling because childhood obesity is on the rise, TV advertising influences children’s food purchases and purchase requests, and kids see so many TV food ads a day.

Harrison and Marske tallied an average of 10.65 food advertisements per hour in their sample. Other research has found that preteens watch on average nearly three hours of television a day, meaning that “the typical child aged 6-11 years would be exposed to approximately 11,000 food advertisements each year.”

The researchers taped 40 hours of TV programming that aired in north-central Illinois between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m. for five weeks. Programs were rated most popular nationwide among viewers aged 6-11 years according to Nielsen Media Research.

The sample consisted of the 10 most-viewed hours from each of four sources: cable programs such as SpongeBob SquarePants; Saturday network programs such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles; syndicated programs such as Everybody Loves Raymond; and network primetime programs such as American Idol.

The sample yielded 1,424 advertisements, 426 (or 29.9 percent) of them for food products.

The researchers then coded each ad as being aimed at a child or an adult audience; foods by type; verbal or visual health-related messages; and characteristics of all human characters.

The second part of the analysis focused on the nutritional breakdown of the advertised foods using data obtained from Nutrition Facts labels.

Heavily advertised foods included Burger King Kids Meal chicken tenders, Jell-O Pudding Bites (chocolate and vanilla), McDonald’s Happy Meal french fries, Post Fruity Pebbles cereal and Wendy’s Kid’s Meal crispy chicken nuggets.

Despite the heavy marketing of such foods, Harrison and her co-author say “parental involvement is the most important factor in the determination of the family diet.”

“Parents can work to maintain the integrity of the family pantry not only through selective shopping, but also through efforts to instruct their children about food and nutrition.”

Also, because research demonstrates a connection between TV viewing and obesity for children and adults alike, parents could curb eating in their household by limiting their children’s – and their own – television viewing.

Other adults should join parents in the “food fight” to combat childhood obesity, Harrison said. The food industry and advertisers, for example, “bear some responsibility for peddling nutritionally inadequate foods so aggressively to kids.”

“Also, the continued investment of the medical and public health communities will be needed if parents are to be successful in helping their children resist the influence of commercial food advertising.”

-By Andrea Lynn, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Read the full Brief, 08/24/2005

The global childhood obesity epidemic is focusing attention on the effects of food and beverage marketing. A recent report published by the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations concluded that marketing of energy-dense foods and fast food outlets is a "probable" cause of increasing overweight and obesity among the world\'s children.Read the full Brief, 08/01/2007

Watching too much television as a child may trigger serious health problems such as autism and obesity, and in girls the early onset of puberty, a scientist has claimed.

So great are the dangers, says Aric Sigman, that watching television should be banned for children under three years old and severely restricted as they grow older.

Writing in the journal Biologist, Dr Sigman says that the average six-year-old child in Britain will have already spent a year watching television, and claims that the simple act of staring at a bright television screen, regardless of a programme’s content, can damage a child’s health.

Dr Sigman identified 15 negative effects that, he says, television can have on youngsters, ranging from short-sightedness and diabetes to premature puberty and autism.

“We may ultimately be responsible for the greatest health scandal of our time,” he writes. “Given the evidence, it would be prudent to cordon off the early years of child development as a time when screen media is excluded and then introduced judiciously as the child matures. Read the full Brief, 02/20/2007

Youngsters who report teasing, rejection, bullying and other types of abuse because of their weight are two to three times more likely to report suicidal thoughts as well as to suffer from other health issues such as high blood pressure and eating disorders, researchers said. Read the full Brief, 07/12/2007

(INDIANAPOLIS) — The nation\'s schools, under fire for unhealthy school lunches, well-stocked vending machines and phys ed cuts, may actually do a better job than parents in keeping children fit and trim. A study found that 5- and 6-year-olds gained more weight over the summer than during the school year, casting doubt on the assumption that kids are more active during summer vacation.

The findings don\'t reveal what\'s behind the out-of-school weight gain, but the researchers speculate it\'s because the summer months lack the structure of the school year with all its activities and daily comings and goings.

Doug Downey, an Ohio State University sociologist who co-authored the study, said that for many youngsters, the lazy days of summer may offer plenty of free time to eat snacks and lounge about watching TV or playing video games.

He said the study seems to point to the need for parents to be more involved, as well as raising the idea of a longer school year and more after-school programs to keep children active.

And schools should continue their efforts to promote good health, he said.

"Trying to improve the quality of school lunches, getting the soda machines out of schools _ those are still good approaches. But clearly the source of children\'s obesity problems lie outside of the school," Downey said.

Read the full Brief, 02/28/2007

ORLANDO, Fla., Feb. 28 – The more a 3-year-old watches television, the more he or she consumes sugary drinks and extra calories, Harvard researchers said today at the American Heart Association’s 47th Annual Conference on Cardiovascular Disease Epidemiology and Prevention.

“For every one-hour increase in TV viewing per day, we found higher intakes of sugar-sweetened beverages including juice (one extra serving per week) and total calories (46.3 more kcal/day),” said Sonia Miller, B.A., lead author of the study and a student at the Harvard Medical School.

Miller and her colleagues based their research on questionnaires from mothers of 1,203 children enrolled at birth in Project Viva, a study of childhood nutrition in Massachusetts funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Just as more TV watching was associated with increased intakes of less healthful foods and nutrients, the researchers said it was also associated with decreased intakes of more healthful foods and nutrients, including fruits and vegetables, calcium and dietary fiber.

“Although 46 calories a day doesn’t sound like much, it can make a difference in weight over time,” said Matthew Gillman, M.D., S.M., senior author and associate professor of ambulatory care and prevention and director of the Obesity Prevention Program for Harvard Medical School and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care.

“Studies estimate that you can explain the amount of excess weight gain in the U.S. adolescent population over the past 10 years or so with the addition of only 150 calories a day. If this “energy gap” also applies to younger children, then each hour of daily TV or video watching could explain about 1/3 of that increase,” Gillman said. Read the full Brief, 03/01/2007

 A small U.S. and German study has found that text messaging may help children fight off obesity by taking advantage of the fact that many youngsters are glued to their cell phones.

Researchers from the University of North Carolina and Germany's University of Heidelberg found text messaging could be used to reduce children's chances of becoming overweight or obese later in life by helping them monitor and modify their behavior.

The study, published in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, involved 58 children aged 5 to 13 and their parents who took part in group education sessions to encourage them to increase physical activity, decrease time spent watching television, and cut back on sugar-sweetened drinks.

The participants were divided into three groups -- one that reported self-monitoring via text messaging, another group with a paper monitoring diary, and a no-monitoring control group.

The study found that children in the text messaging group were far more likely to stick to their goals -- 43 percent -- than those with a paper diary -- 19 percent.

Shin-Yi Chou,  Lehigh College; Inas Rashad, Georgia State University; Michael Grossman, City University of New York

Banning fast food advertisements from children’s television programs would reduce the number of overweight children in the U.S. by 18 percent and decrease the number of overweight teens by 14 percent, economists have estimated in a new study.

The researchers used several statistical models to link obesity rates to the amount of time spent viewing fast food advertising, finding that viewing more fast food commercials on television raises the risk of obesity in children. The study appears in this month’s issue of The Journal of Law and Economics.

“There is not a lot of evidence that overweight kids are more likely to watch TV than other kids,” said Michael Grossman, professor of economics at the City University of New York. “We’re arguing the causality is how many messages are aired -- seeing more of these messages is leading people to put on weight.”

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Childhood obesity in the United States appears to be causing girls to reach puberty at an earlier age, for reasons that are not clear, a study said on Monday.

The report from the University of Michigan\'s Mott Children\'s Hospital said a multiyear study following a group of 354 girls found that those who were fatter at age 3 and who gained weight during the next thre