Screen test: Ask if your daycare provider is exposing your kids to too much TV.

RODALE NEWS, EMMAUS, PA—A study of kids and television just published in the medical journal Pediatrics proves what every frazzled parent comes to realize at one point or another: TV makes a tempting babysitter. Only this study illustrates, it's true for day-care and preschool caregivers as well as parents. Home-based child-care settings seem particularly prone to exposing kids to TV time.

THE DETAILS: Researchers from the Center for Child Health, Behavior, and Development at the Seattle Children’s Research Institute surveyed 168 licensed child-care programs in Michigan, Washington, Florida, and Massachusetts by phone to explore how kids and television interact in day-care settings. They asked each care provider how often the infants, toddlers, and preschool-aged children in the programs watched TV (which included DVD and videotape viewing). What they found was that, with the exception of infants, who watched little TV in any setting, children in home-based programs were exposed to significantly more TV on an average day than the children in center-based programs: Toddlers in home-based programs watched 1.6 hours of TV during an average day, while toddlers in center-based programs watched 0.1 hours; preschoolers in home-based programs watched 2.4 hours per day, while preschoolers in center-based programs watched 0.4 hours.

For some children, this troubling data on kids and television means a doubling of their daily screen time, says lead study author Dimitri A. Christakis, MD, director of the Center for Child Health, Behavior, and Development at Seattle Children’s Hospital. "We’ve long known that preschool children watch two to three hours of television per day, but that statistic was based solely on parental reporting of home viewing, and neglected to account for day-care viewing." The goal of this study was to get a more accurate estimate of total screen time per day for kids in that age group.