Week: 604.4

Guest: Dr. Timothy Doran, Pediatric physician, Flagship Health Care, Assoc. Prof. of Pediatrics, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Baltimore

Topic: Kids watching too much TV

Host/Producer: Steve Girard

NEMA: Cutting back TV for kids....coming up..

SPOT: NEMA...the National Emergency Medicine Association...fights our worst health enemies - heart disease, stroke, trauma. Call 800-332-6362.

NEMA: Looking for a New Year’s resolution? How about cutting back the number of TV hours for you and your kids? Dr. Tim Doran is a pediatrician with Flagship Health Care....who says study after study shows the strong link between TV violence and violence in society....

DORAN: By the time a kid reaches the 6th grade, he will have witnessed at least 8 thousand murders, and over 100 thousand other acts of violence on TV. Another astonishing figure. And to reiterate, it’s crystal clear that the violence on TV does get transmitted, and those messages do get transmitted to children, and if we really want to decrease the amount of violence in society, we really need to address the violence on TV.

Children watch, on average, as much as 4 hours a day of television, and that’s time that they’re spending in front of the TV that they’re not spending on other activities: physical exercise, reading...other pursuits...The average kindergarten student (repeats) will have watched on average 5 thousand hours of TV by the time they hit kindergarten. And that actually is more time than he or she will spend in an elementary school classroom.