Why is television not working?

The link between childhood TV watching and unemployment cannot be ignored according to a recent study co-authored by an AUT University academic, and the next step is to look at why children prefer television to other activities.

Lecturer Erik Landhuis, from the Department of Social Sciences at AUT University, was the lead author of a study on the association between childhood and adolescent television viewing and unemployment in adulthood.

Data from the study came from Otago University's Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study, where Landhuis was a research fellow prior to coming to AUT, and looked at the television viewing of 1037 children born in Dunedin.

Researchers looked at television viewing, educational achievement, family socioeconomic status, cognitive ability and early behavioural problems during the course of the study.

Results then showed most study members reported at least some unemployment between the ages of 18 and 32 years. In assessing the association between childhood television viewing and unemployment the study found that watching television as a child predicted a period of at least six months continuous unemployment.

Of those that watched less than two hours a day, 18 per cent went on to spend 12 months continuously unemployed and for those that watched more than three hours a day 32 per cent would be unemployed for over a year.

Landhuis says the authors of this research always thought there would be a link between childhood television viewing and unemployment as adults, but they thought this would be explained by education.

"TV is known to reduce educational achievement and that in turn leads to increased unemployment.

"However while education partially explained the relationship this wasn't the whole picture," he says.

"In fact, we introduced many control variables in numerous analyses and we couldn't make the link between TV and unemployment go away."

For Landhuis the question now is 'why is television so much more interesting than other kids activities?'

He says it is no secret that watching television is 'bad' for children and the reasons why they do it is intuitively quite easy to answer; because it is interesting.

"It stimulates our pleasure centres and it does it really well. But that doesn't really explain anything. The more interesting and difficult question now is, why is watching television more attractive than playing games, reading stories, playing in the mud or with toys?"

Landhuis is now addressing this question alongside Dr Stephen Reay from AUT's Product Design department and Professor Grant Schofield, the director of the Centre for Physical Activity and Nutrition at AUT.

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Click here to find out more on the Centre for Physical Activity and Nutrition.