It's never fun to discover a mistake after something has already gone to press, and when it happens in a book, it's worse yet.
In the preface and first chapter of my upcoming book, I describe data from a national survey used by Dimitri Christakis and Frederick Zimmerman in their 2004 Pediatrics article that showed an association between attention problems and the viewing of television in early childhood. I mistakenly said that the data came from the 1980s. It didn't. It was based on survey data from the 1990s.
We'll make the correction in second printings, but it's too late to make the change in the early versions of the book. I am kicking myself as I type.
If you're curious about my description of their research, you can read some of it in a story I wrote for The Washington Post back in 2004. In my upcoming book, I go into more detail about the study, including more caveats and quotes from ADHD experts who have criticized it. The main point of dissecting the study is to quell some of the furor and misinformation generated by media reports of the results. (For example, the study did not include any survey data about diagnoses of ADHD; it relied on parents' reports of behavioral problems in their kids.)
It's also important to point out how little we know about cause-and-effect. To say that attention problems are linked to watching TV doesn't mean that attention problems are caused by watching TV, as the study authors readily acknowledge. In fact, some experts say there is reason to believe that the causal arrow could point the other direction. For example, maybe children who have attention problems at age 7 showed signs of problems at earlier ages, leading their parents to put them in front of the TV as a coping mechanism. Or perhaps, given that ADHD is thought to be hereditary, the parents of these children have attention problems themselves. Researchers have noted that people with ADHD may watch more TV, in part as a way to cope with the isolation that comes with the disorder. And if the parents are watching a lot of TV, it's likely that their very young children are too. In short, there's a lot more to learn before definitive statements can be made about TV's relationship to ADHD.
10:01:59 AM 
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