It may be all too easy to plonk your child in front of the television at the end of a busy day - but scientists warn you may be creating the habit of a lifetime.
A study spanning three decades reveals that children who spend their evenings watching television are likely to become lifelong couch potatoes.
The research, based on data from 6,000 British people, suggests that childhood pastimes can influence someone’s health for decades to come. Scientists at University College London, who carried out the study, warned parents to take heed of the findings and encourage their children to have a more active lifestyle. Public health expert Dr Mark Hamer will tell a research conference today: ‘This has important implications for policy and practice.
‘It suggests that interventions to reduce passive TV viewing time should target children and their parents. Such initiatives could not only help today’s children but help to reduce passive TV viewing in future generations.
‘That could be extremely beneficial as research has also shown that TV viewing is associated with other health-risk behaviours, such as the consumption of energy-dense foods and cigarette smoking.
‘Prolonged TV viewing has also been linked to type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease.’
The research was based on information from the 1970 British Cohort Study, a huge dataset from thousands of people born in a single week in 1970.
In 1980, when the participants were aged 10, scientists conducted a set of interviews about their health and leisure habits.
The questions included how often the children watched television, with the answers given as ‘never’, ‘sometimes’ or ‘often’.
The scientists went back in 2012, when the participants were aged 42, and again asked them about their lifestyle, with the answers given in number of hours of television watched per week.
They found the childhood habits had ‘tracked’ into adulthood.
Some 83 per cent of the participants who watched more than three hours of TV at 42 had watched TV ‘often’ at age 10, they found.
The study also showed that 42-year-olds who watched TV for at least three hours a day were more likely to be in only ‘fair’ or ‘poor’ health and to report that they were either overweight or obese.
They were also more likely to have had fathers who were overweight.
The paper, which will be presented at the Centre for Longitudinal Study conference in London today, says: ‘To our knowledge this is the first study to investigate early life correlates of TV viewing time in middle age adults in a large representative birth cohort.
‘Interventions to reduce passive TV viewing time should target both children and their parents. Intervening now in both children and their parents may be a successful strategy to reduce passive TV viewing time in our future generations.
‘Potential interventions may target “family time” and aim to displace passive TV viewing with active screen-based alternatives - e.g. active computer gaming - or outdoor activities that encourage movement.
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