Does watching TV cause attention problems?

Scientific litsketch on boosting motivation

There has been a widespread belief that watching TV before the age of 3 causes attention problems such as reducing the ability to concentrate and pay attention during school age. However, recent research shows that the evidence does not support this belief (McBee et al., 2021).

The research reanalysed the data from a previous study that found the harmful effects of TV exposure on attention (Christakis et al., 2004), and found that this finding is not supported by more reliable statistical methods. For example, other factors such as family income, parents' highest level of education, and the child's energy levels and the ability to regulate attention were included in the analyses. Also, missing data were estimated and included in the analyses rather than removing them. Other variations in the methods yielded a total of 848 different ways of analysing the data, among which only 166 resulted in a significant relationship between TV exposure and attention problems. This shows that there is not enough evidence to conclude that TV watching causes attention problems.

McBee, Matthew T., Rebecca J. Brand, and Wallace E. Dixon Jr. "Challenging the Link Between Early Childhood Television Exposure and Later Attention Problems: A Multiverse Approach." Psychological Science 32, no. 4 (2021): 496-518.