Turn Off That TV or You are Going to Be Depressed.
It turns out that the amount of television that your teenager watches during his or her youth may be a determinant of whether they develop depression later in life, a recent study has found. According a report in the Los Angeles Times, researchers from Pitt and Harvard found that for each additional hour of TV watched per day there was an increased risk of depression in adulthood of 8%.
Other forms of media, such as the bedeviled video games, did not have such a correlation.
Of course, such a study doesn't prove that TV makes teens turn into depressed adults a wide range of other factors could also contribute to mental illness later in life. However, given the fact that excessive TV viewing also contributes to a sedentary lifestyle associated with childhood obesity and other behaviors known to contribute to obesity and other morbidities--limiting the amount of teen television watching is probably a good idea all the way around.
So what does this mean for the moral responsibility of parents these days? Make your kids turn off the television and give them a good book or get them on a skateboard a little more often, you just might be doing their mental health later in life a favor.
Summer Johnson, PhD
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