SAN FRANCISCO — The epidemic of obesity among children is tightly correlated with the increasing time children spend watching television, but there are a number of effective strategies for reducing television time, William H. Dietz, M.D., said at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
The strategies derive from 180 interviews with parent/child pairs, said Dr. Dietz, director of the division of nutrition and physical activity at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta.
Here are some messages to get across to parents, or strategies to use with parents:
▸ Start early. Efforts to reduce television time must start early. It's much easier to avoid placing a television into a child's bedroom than to remove one once it's there.
▸ Pay attention to time as well as content. Most parents are more concerned about what children watch than about how much they watch, but they need to pay more attention to television time, Dr. Dietz said. While parents tend to monitor their children's television habits to make sure they're not exposed to sexuality, violence, or drug use, studies have repeatedly shown that it's total viewing time that predicts overweight most closely. There's a similar relationship between total viewing time and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.
▸ Offer children alternatives to TV. According to the CDC interviews, children don't really regard television watching as “fun.” Instead, they regard television watching as a default behavior. “That means that if we ask children what they could do that would be more fun than watching television, we may be able to engage them around behavior change,” Dr. Dietz said. Also, you may have to persuade the parents to work on changing their children's behavior. Parents are likely to control television time if they see it as interfering with important family values such as family time and schoolwork. Parents tend to be amenable to suggestions that mealtimes should be reserved for family discussions and that televisions should be turned off, for example. And they're more amenable to controlling television time during the school week than on weekends.
Television executives themselves have worked to change television watching behavior. Nickelodeon, a popular children's cable channel, voluntarily went dark for 3 hours on Saturday, Oct. 2, 2004, the “Worldwide Day of Play,” and the channel actively encouraged children to become more physically active.
The CDC itself is conducting an expensive advertising campaign called “VERB: It's what you do,” that's aimed at “tweens” (children aged 9–13). In the first year of this campaign, which was launched in October 2002, the CDC spent $125 million to get its message out.
The campaign has been quite successful. In its first year it reached 92% of all tweens, and 74% say they're aware of the campaign. And the CDC is able to document significant increases in weekly free-time physical activity among children reached by the campaign.
Various VERB materials are available at www.cdc.gov