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elevision can be a powerful teacher (17). Watching Sesame Street is an example of how toddlers can learn valuable lessons about racial harmony, cooperation, kindness, simple arithmetic and the alphabet through an educational television format. Some public television programs stimulate visits to the zoo, libraries, bookstores, museums and other active recreational settings, and educational videos can certainly serve as powerful prosocial teaching devices

The educational value of Sesame Street, has been shown to improve the reading and learning skills of its viewers (18). In some disadvantaged settings, healthy television habits may actually be a beneficial teaching tool (17).

High school programs promoting media awareness have been shown to be beneficial (4). They give students more understanding of how the media may affect them socially.

All TV is not alike," says co-author Aletha Huston, PhD, professor of child development at the University of Texas at Austin. "Educational television can have a very positive impact on young children."

"Children who watched educational programming — particularly at age 2 and 3 — performed better on tests of school-related skills than children who did not watch educational television," says Huston. "Watching a lot of general audience programming was related to poor skills."

My audacious idea is to use television to help children learn their letters and, maybe, even to read.  This may be a surprising suggestion given that TV is cited as a main reason for the decline in children’s reading.

First, children watch a lot of TV – on average four hours a day, which turns out to be more time than they spend in school each year. Second, having print and reading materials at home helps kids learn to read. And, the more they read, the better they read. Unfortunately, more than 30% of city children live in poor households which tend to have few books or reading materials.  One study found that poor families had, on average, less than one book per household. The third reason is that TVs must all have the technology to show captions and most programs and movies must have written transcripts. So, if you turn on your TV’s captioning feature, the words that are spoken – and many of the sounds as well – will appear in writing at the bottom of your screen.

More than four in 10 (43%) of children under the age of 2 watch TV every day and nearly one in five (18%) watch videos or DVDs every da

ver the last three decades many studies have focused on television and children, with a fair amount of emphasis on preschool-aged children. To date, infants and toddlers have received limited attention. This is starting to change given the big boom in programs and products directed at the very young -

Programs that are well designed and take into consideration children's developmental stages are more likely to have educational merit than shows not geared toward their healthy growth