• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, July 6, 2005

Virtually all TV studies on children lead to the same conclusion that TV is bad for growing minds. But it also creates something else: bullies with proper speech.

First, the bad news: The Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University says kids who have TV in their bedrooms are apt to have less academic success than those that don't. The implication is of course, with no TV in a room, there is consequently more time to read books.

The study did not seemingly look into whether TVs in other parts of the house, in living rooms, for example, yield the same result. Some of the blame goes to the parents who are too lazy to part with an older set and instead stick in their kid's room.

Another study from the University of Washington shows that kids under 3-years-old who watch any TV will suffer poor reading and math scores when they hit ages 7 and 8. That study says even the best of educational programs are bad. Take that, "Sesame Street" and "Teletubbies."

Ah. But there is a silver lining. Older children actually get some benefit from watching TV - they learn to sound out words better than children who don't use TV. This makes sense - as adults can learn foreign languages faster by watching TV.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has always recommended no TV for children under the age of 2. For older children, the academy suggests no more than one to two hours a day of "quality" television - whatever that means. Does a Dodgers-Padres nail-biter count?

The authors of the University of Washington study, Frederick Zimmerman, co-director of the Child Health Institute and Dr. Dimitri Christakis, have done other surveys on kids and TV. One conclusion that came from the recent study: kids have attention problems and have a tendency to become bullies from watching too much TV.

That doesn't sound like a bad thing, necessarily. The more financially inclined bullies help grow the country and become, obviously, savvy-speaking media moguls. Just my luck. Growing up, I knew I missed too many episodes of "The Honeymooners" and "F Troop."