Children in Home Daycares Watch More TV

According to a new study, children in home-based daycares are plopped in front of the television more than those in center-based care systems.

U.S. researchers, including Dr. Dimitri A. Christakis, the lead researcher and director to the Center for Child Health, Behavior and Development at Seattle Children's Research Institute and professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington School of Medicine, set out to study the amount of television viewing taking place in the two types of child-care programs.

According to the findings, pre-school aged children in home-based care watched an average of 2.4 hours of television daily. Center-based settings used television, on average, for only .4 hours, reports United Press International.

For toddlers, the viewing time decreased, but the margin of difference did not noticeably improve. Toddlers in home-based care watched 1.6 hours of television compared to the .1 hour watched by those in center-based care.

The study also noted that home-based care that employed staff with college degrees tended to report hours of television viewing closer to those of center-based daycares.

To gather the data, researchers studied 168 daycares, 94 of which were home-based. In the final report, the authors expressed concern over the findings, which did not differ greatly from results of studies from past years.

"The lack of change is disconcerting," the authors asserted, reports the LA Times, "given the intervening publication of the American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines regarding television use for young children."

The complete study will be published in the December issue of Pediatrics.