From the very moment of its invention, television has been a focus of concern for America's parents--and for good reason. Research studies have consistently affirmed that the average child spends more time watching television than he spends in school, at church, or talking with parents. For many children, television is an electronic babysitter, and an entertainment engine of almost mesmerizing power.

Over the past three decades, a series of academic studies has considered the impact of television programming on children. The nation has gone through recurring waves of anxiety over television programming, concerned with the impact of violence, sensuality, and negative role models on young minds.

Just recently, attention has turned to a more fundamental question. Does watching television actually change the way children think, not just how they think? A recent study published in the journal Pediatrics should set off alarm bells around the nation.

Under the direction of pediatricians at the University of Washington, researchers considered the connection between exposure to television and a loss of attentiveness. After studying over two thousand five hundred children, the researchers determined that one hour of daily television exposure in children from birth to three years old is directly tied to as much as a ten percent loss of attentiveness when the children reach age seven.

The article, "Early Television Exposure and Subsequent Attentional Problems in Children" traces the influence of early television exposure to the fact that "the newborn brain continues to develop rapidly through the first few years of life and that considerable plasticity exists during this period." In other words, the actual process of watching television tends to "rewire" the brains of very young children, so that they grow accustomed to visual stimulation and multiple visual exposures. As the researchers determined: "The types and intensity of visual and auditory experiences that children have early in life therefore may have profound influences on brain development."

Television does not merely replicate everyday life and customary ways of experiencing the world. In the real world, our eyes are directed at objects around us, and we see from one perspective at a measured pace controlled by our own eye movements. Television, on the other hand, controls attention by offering multiple scene shifts, electronic visual stimulation, words accompanied by sound track, and stimulation by other visual cues presented on the television screen.

As the researchers explained the problem: "In contrast to the pace with which real life unfolds and is experienced by young children, television can portray rapidly changing images, scenery, and events. It can be over stimulating yet extremely interesting." In clinical terms, the researchers theorized "that very early exposure to television during the critical periods of synaptic development would be associated with subsequent attentional problems."