The Monster In The Living Room

Yes, your kid will die!

No slippery slope here, obviously.

Ban under-threes from watching television, says study 

Doctors and government health officials should set limits, as they do for alcohol, on the amount of time children spend watching screens – and under-threes should be kept away from the television altogether, according to a paper in an influential medical journal published on Tuesday.

Wow! We've seen the 'no safe limit' for tobacco ensconced in the feeble-minded political class, and the same agitprop is being developed for alcohol as we speak, but this guy has gone 'all in' already for TV watching.

The review was written by psychologist Dr Aric Sigman, author of a book on the subject ...

Reckon that might be significant?

On average, he says, a British teenager spends six hours a day looking at screens at home – not including any time at school. In North America, it is nearer eight hours. But, says Sigman, negative effects on health kick in after about two hours of sitting still, with increased long-term risks of obesity and heart problems.

Think of the children coupled with moral health panic. It's like ticking off a bingo card, isn't it? One wonders when someone may start thinking of the poor parents, constantly having guilt cascaded on them by stories like this.

Now, such anti-TV scaremongery has been played out by miserable arseholes since even your tabloid-gushing host was watching Champion the Wonder Horse and Robinson Crusoe on 1970s Saturday morning TV. However, they were at least more honest back then and didn't trot out anything as classless as heart problems and obesity. They were joy-hating bastards, and proud of it! Not like the spineless modern equivalent, oh for the good old days, eh?

What's more Sigman has form. He doesn't like any screens at all.

Social networking sites such as Facebook could raise your risk of serious health problems by reducing levels of face-to-face contact, a doctor claims.

Emailing people rather than meeting up with them may have wide-ranging biological effects, said psychologist Dr Aric Sigman. 

Increased isolation could alter the way genes work and upset immune responses, hormone levels and the function of arteries. It could also impair mental performance. 

This could increase the risk of problems as serious as cancer, strokes, heart disease and dementia, Dr Sigman says in Biologist, the journal of the Institute of Biology.

That's a hell of a lot of 'coulds' there. I do hope he has the research to back it up.

But the issue is controversial and his opinions and standing are questioned by Dorothy Bishop, professor of developmental neuropsychology at Oxford University who says that although this is an important topic, Sigman's paper is not "an impartial expert review of evidence for effects on health and child development". "Aric Sigman does not appear to have any academic or clinical position, or to have done any original research on this topic," she said. "His comments about impact of screen time on brain development and empathy seem speculative in my opinion, and the arguments that he makes could equally well be used to conclude that children should not read books."

Books like ones Sigman writes do you mean? Hush, Dorothy, you'll cock up his scam!

No. Of course he doesn't have any decent research, his kind never do. Others, like him, also pretend to be health professors instead of, say, aircraft engineers or sociologists. Just yet another self-enriching cocktrumpet, then, which the health lobby is infested with these days. The one thing in this particular guy's favour is that at least he doesn't force us to pay for his bullshit through our taxes, like biblical plagues of others we could mention.

Still, we're likely to see these limits barked at us at some point considering - as the article mentions - they are already being promoted across the Atlantic. Some furrow-browed, publicity-chasing MP proposing the same here is just a matter of time away.

H/T the must-bookmark Harridanic.