The effects of TV program pacing on the behavior of preschool children

Most discussion and research concerning the effects of television on young children have centered on the impact of specific program content on social or cognitive behavior. There has been considerably less concern about the effects of watching television per se. Recently, however, a number of critics have been concerned with a structural aspect of the medium itself--program pacing. T. Berry Brazelton, the noted pediatrician, is foremost among the critics: "The disintegration of ego mechanisms which one sees in [the child's] hypersensitivity and in the screaming, thrashing, disorganized hyperactivity which ensues after a period of television watching in most children is evidence of the cost of such a period" (quoted by McDaniel, 1972). Sabin (1972) cites Brazelton in asserting "that television assailed young viewers with exhausting stimuli akin to the sounds, fears and tensions that have gradually killed prisoners in concentration camps." Brazelton is not alone in his concern: "To give a child 30 seconds of one thing and then to switch it and give him 30 seconds of another is to nurture irrelevance and to give reinforcement to a type of intellectual process that can never engage in sustained and developed thought" (Culhane, 1970).