Too much TV turns kids dumb: New study

If you are a teenager, listen to your elders when they say, 'Don't watch so much television.'

There is a reason why it is called the idiot box.

A new, comprehensive study says watching television for three hours a day or more results in youngsters' education suffering and they develop learning difficulties.

And don't just dismiss this study as yet another report -- it followed 700 families for 20 years to come to the conclusions. The families in New York state were picked from a wide cross-section of people, so that other variables -- like family, income, etc -- did not become factors.

'We found a very clear correlation between higher levels of TV watching by 14-year-olds and subsequent attention and learning problems developed during the remainder of their years,' Dr Jeffrey Johnson, lead author of the study in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Psychiatry, told Christian Science Monitor.

The researchers believe that children who watch a lot of television find reading and concentrating in class more difficult because their brains are used to television, which requires less intellectual effort.

The Guardian reports that British children in the age group of 11 to 15 years watch television for seven hours a day on an average. No such data is immediately available for India, though.