Keep the TV out of the bedroom

Having a TV or video game equipment can hurt your student's chances of doing well in school.  Research from around the world shows how harmful having a TV and/or video game equipment in child's bedroom. 

Students who do not watch TV or play video games during the week do better in school than students who watch TV during the week.  Why?  Educators believe students should study every night, read every night, and get plenty of rest every night.  If you had TV or video games on school nights then that takes time away from studying, reading and rest.

Putting a TV and/or video game equipment in the student's bedroom makes doing well in school even harder. A TV in a bedroom makes it harder for parents to see if the student is doing their homework. Reading time is reduced or worse the student does not read at all.  Consider the following points:

• Children with a TV in their bedroom do worse on math and reading than children with no TV in their bedrooms (click here for comparison chart).
• Children with a TV in their bedroom watch 4 hours of TV more a week than kids without a TV did worse in school than kids who did not watch any TV during a school night. 
• Children who watch just one hour of TV were less likely to finish their homework. Children that watched 3 or more hours a day were even more likely to not finish their homework.
• Research shows that children with a TV in their bedroom have a lower GPA than kids without TVs in their bedrooms (2.6 vs. 2.9) - University of Minnesota School of Public Health
• Kids with 1 electronic device were more likely to be overweight.  Kids with 3 more or devices had an even greater chance of being overweight.  The reason is when kids have electronics in their rooms they are more likely to not get enough sleep and are exposed to more advertising promoting poor eating habits.
• Kids who do not sleep enough have greater physical and mental health problems
• Kids who sleep enough do better in school.
• The more television a child watches the harder it is to get a bachelor's degree be age 26 (click here for chart).

If you want your teen to have the best chance of academic success, consider limiting television viewing to less than an hour a day. Save television time for weekends, when your teen wants to watch a show with friends or family. Don't let television viewing become a default activity when your teen is bored. And be careful of letting your teen have a television in his bedroom. A study published in the April 2008 issue of "Pediatrics" found that not only did teens who had a television in their bedroom have less academic success, but they also were less physically active, spent less time eating meals with family and had poor dietary habits.