Watching just nine minutes of “SpongeBob SquarePants” hurt the ability of four-year-olds to to delay gratification, compared with watching an educational cartoon or spending the time drawing, a new study finds.
From Ideas Market.
P.S. Like most psych research, the sample size is unaccountably and unjustifiably small (60 kids) and so the result is probably false. But this still doesn’t mean we get to buy a TV.
3 Responses
Get the TV. Watch educational cartoons. Together.
You don’t build resilience by avoiding things. But Jeannie already knows that, so something else is going on? Something about delayed gratification?
I’m from Pittsburgh. When I was in college would volunteer at a preschool. I thought Mister Rogers was incredibly boring and even thought him weird. But then I got to watch children watching Mister Rogers and it was clear they didn’t find him boring, indeed they dug him. TV or no one of the things Fred Rogers understood was pacing communication with children. He allowed enough time for kids to respond. It’s an important lesson. I see too often adults missing what their young kids are communicating because they’re not waiting. The communication style has a simple rhythm. Some people just seem to get right off the bat, but it’s a rhythm everyone can learn.
The P.S. sounds like a different way of saying that most events don’t happen again. Is that really true? Particularly of believable events? Saying that something is probably false or probably true based solely on sample size seems to be an overly quantitative and statistical way to approach plausibility in the world. Do you hear me?