Pediatrics: Those Tired Children

The 30 patients, aged three to twelve, had two things in common: they lived on U.S. Air Force bases; and they were suffering from nervousness, continuous fatigue, headaches, loss of sleep, belly aches, and sometimes vomiting. The medics at both Fairchild A.F.B., near Spokane, Wash., and Lackland A.F.B.

in Texas asked all the obvious questions of both the kids and their parents; they did all the usual tests for infections and childhood illnesses, checked the food and water supply — and found nothing to account for what they called “the tired-child syndrome.” In desperation, the medics went back to questioning the parents about their children’s habits. Only after several interviews did the truth come out. The youngsters were spending from three to six hours watching TV every weekday, and six to ten hours on Saturdays and Sundays. Captain Richard M. Narkewicz and Captain Stanley M. Graven told the American Academy of Pediatrics in Manhattan last week that some of the younger children were spending a quarter of their waking hours watching TV.

Yet their parents had not volunteered this information. It was only in response to the insistent, direct question, “How many hours a day does your child watch TV?”, that the facts emerged.

In each of 30 cases, the doctors prescribed total abstinence from TV for a while. In twelve cases the parents enforced the rule, and the children’s symptoms vanished in two to three weeks. In 18 cases the parents cut the TV time to about two hours a day, and the children’s symptoms did not go away for five or six weeks. But in eleven cases, the parents later relaxed the rules, the kids were again spending long hours in front of the picture tube—and they were as sick as before.

It is not that TV in itself is necessarily bad for children, said Dr. Narkewicz.

But some youngsters, usually those of an introspective and sensitive nature, become addicted to it. They fall into a vicious cycle in which long hours of viewing leave them too tired to do anything more strenuous than sprawl out to do more viewing. The ultimate cure is as simple as it is radical: send the kids out to play, and after dark give them a book to read.