Since at least 2011, various pediatric researchers have sounded the alarm on the dangers of too much television for children—an alarm that’s gone mostly ignored, because it can’t be heard over the TV you put on to get, like, two hours of peace. Those two hours will kill you, those scientists said four years ago, as will binge-watching or enjoying especially good programming, while any TV viewing at all is shaving precious minutes off your life that you could have spent pursuing a career in science-based scolding.
Now a newer, even more alarmist study says that even an hour of television per day will mold your child into a little butterball, slowly oozing its way to the grave. These latest findings are set to be published next month in the Journal Of Just Look What You’re Doing To Them! Look!, then clipped and mailed by concerned grandmothers who don’t even live in the same goddamn city.
Building on all that previous research about TV’s correlating contribution to a sedentary lifestyle (and without anyone doing their own report on how lazy that is), researchers looked at some 11,000 children who were enrolled in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, which measures the geographical region of your fat-ass kids. The Longitudinal Study not only found that your kid so fat, he uses the equator for a belt, it also found that kindergarteners who watched as little as one hour of television were 50 to 70-percent more likely to be overweight, and 58 to 73-percent more likely to be obese—often by the time they entered first grade. This becomes especially hard on them around first-grade prom.
In all cases, TV viewing was said to make the most difference in a child’s weight gain—and specifically TV. “Scientists saw no similar results with kindergartners who were using computers,” CNN says, as they used those computers mostly to peruse cross-fit forums.
To prevent all that, doctors recommend encouraging children to engage in more physical exercise and outdoor activity, and limit their TV viewing time to the stolen minutes they glimpse longingly through the windows of neighbor children, until they are shooed away. And after those recommendations are also ignored, scientists are expected to suggest you limit your TV usage to just crushing your infants with it in their cribs, you negligent monster.