One of the most delightful pieces of nonsense of the past decade has been SpongeBob Square Pants, a show proud to shovel absurdity onto televisions for 22 minutes a go. But one question we have to ask ourselves - does all this joyous lunacy harm the brains of our children? Remember, children have the smallest, most worthless brains.
A study set out to answer that question by determining the short term effects of watching fast paced cartoons on children. Researchers took 60 different 4 year old kids and randomly assigned them into three groups - one group that got to watch SpongeBob, one that had to watch some educational cartoon, possibly about conjugating verbs, and one group full of poor souls didn't get to watch any TV at all and had to draw.
The study was run by Doctor Angeline Lillard, PhD, who described the effects as "immediate and strong" but admitted there was a limit to how long those effects would last. But that isn't much of an indictment against cartoons, is it? I mean, if you give ANYONE something awesome, then in their minds it becomes that much harder to do something less awesome. It's like giving someone a bite of your steak and then expecting them to eat the McDonald's hamburger you've left in your fridge for three days.
The tests measured the kids' ability to concentrate, reason, and delay gratification. One specific test involved giving the kids a snack and recording how long they could avoid eating it. But we don't even know what these snacks were! For all we know, the SpongeBob kids could have been given chocolate covered cherries and Toblerones while the kids who were drawing got rice cakes and salt.
The results came in showing 70 percent of kids in the drawing group completing the tests successfully, compared to 35 in the educational cartoon group and a lousy 15 percent in the SpongeBob group. So... okay. That's kind of significant. Huh.
But wait! Nickelodeon has a rebuttal! They suggest that the size of the group tested - 60 kids - isn't enough to matter. Also, there's a chance that those kids ALREADY HAD attention problems as they never established a pre-cartoon attention baseline. Then there's the fact that all of these kids were of upper-middle class parents and were all white, so there was no diversity to the survey. And finally, SpongeBob is actually listed as being for ages 6-11! It's not even made for 4 year olds, you dummy researchers!
Even without those potential errors, I tend to agree with Nickelodeon about the study. Just speaking anecdotally, I know I watched a lot of cartoons as a kid, and I don't have any attention problems. Have you guys seen this dinosaur dressed up as a Batman statue?
Should kids as young as 4 be watching SpongeBob? Or is their attention span too precious to risk? Let us know what you think in the comments!!
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