Preschoolers are watching a lot more television than we thought.

Preschool-age children in home-based daycare watched, on average, 2.4 hours of TV a day, compared to those in centers who sat in front of a television 0.4 hours, a report released this morning in Pediatrics found.

These findings could reverberate throughout the early learning world. That’s because other research has begun linking too much screen time among preschool students to language delays, attention issues, obesity and even aggression, the study’s lead researcher, Dr. Dimitri Christakis, head of the Center for Child Health, Behavior and Development at Seattle Children's Hospital, says. The study is the first in more than two decades to explore TV watching in child care, a span of time when both television and child care changed dramatically.

“At the same time, studies show that high quality preschool can be beneficial to children’s development. Unfortunately, for many children, the potential benefits of preschool may be being displaced by passive TV viewing,” Christakis said in a statement.

While it may be surprising to learn preschool-age children in home-based care average more than two hours of TV time, when you dig a little deeper you find that when these programs have college-educated teachers, television-watching levels are nearer to those at centers.

This could be yet another argument for quality child care, since the telephone-based study of 168 child care programs suggests when teachers have higher training kids are less likely to watch television.

The report is only the latest in the still emerging field of research into television’s impact on children. Earlier this year Christakis released a study that found babies hear far fewer words and conversations when a television is on.

In recent years, we also learned that 40 percent of babies watch TV and that baby DVDs could impact acquisition of vocabulary.

The twist in today’s report, though, is that much of the attention has focused on kids watching TV at home. It looks like we need to pay attention to those television sets in classrooms as well as living rooms.

“We are increasingly technologizing childhood, which may prove harmful to the next generation of adults. Parents and health care providers should know how many total hours of screen time and what programs constitute children’s media diet, just as they should know how many calories and what foods they’re ingesting per day,” Christakis added.

Luckily, today’s report offers tips for parents and early learning educators:

• Talk to your daycare teachers and director about TV use and your concerns.
• Staff should “remember that screen time is not proven to provide any benefits to children and may in fact cause harm.”
• “Set ‘media-free’ days.”
• “Avoid using TV as a reward.”
• “Watch TV actively with children.”

You can read all of the tips near the bottom of the press release.

Check out the full article here.