[Resident_Geek]

> I'm convinced that watching TV is harmful to a child's intellectual development. (And there's an established body of evidence to support that.)

Is there? I dislike children being raised by television as much as the next guy, but the chapter in Freakonomics on child development says there's no correlation between children's test scores and the amount of television they watch, according to the data from ECLS (http://nces.ed.gov/ecls/).

(edited to correct typo)

[GeneralMaximus]

Are test scores the only indicators of a child's development? I know enough people who have excellent test scores but have no initiative, no confidence, no curiosity, no hunger for learning things that are not on the test, no drive and no creativity.

Of course, anecdote != data, so meh. But I do have a hunch that TV and social media both breed a passive consumption habit that can be hard to detect and even harder to get rid of.

[awj]

I don't think they're the only ones, or that they're particularly good ones, but they are some of the only ones that we can measure.

That said, our anecdotes at least agree. I'm with you on that hunch, too.

[seclorum]

Umm .. there's no correlation between test scores and intelligence these days, either though ..