One of Britain’s leading authority’s on children’s speech development, she completed a ten year study which showed that the background noise in the average two year olds day can delay his or her acquisition of a language by up to a year. Almost invariably the background noise came from television.
Amongst other things she found that:
· Children learn to speak from their parents and parents don’t play or talk enough with their children when the TV is on.

· Background noise from TV or radio, confuses infants. In response they learn to ignore all noise and then they ignore speech.

· Children of two years or older should not be exposed to more than two hours of TV a day.

· Children of one year old or younger should not be exposed to television at all.
Sally Ward is currently preparing to focus on television and the way it affects our attention. In particular she will be looking at Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). “. . . a lot of people think it’s chemical,” she says, but in her view . . . “it’s very peculiar that at the onset of children’s television it got a lot more prevalent, and at the onset of children’s video’s it got a lot more prevalent.”
Her concern is being reiterated in America where child psychologist John Rosemond has stirred some controversy by suggesting that ADHD is environmentally created; a suggestion that is completely at odds with the pharmaceutical industry, which maintains that the disorder is genetically inherited and makes considerable profit as a result.
“Ritalin may work, temporarily,” says Rosemond, “But pharmaceutical intervention won’t change behavioural and motivational problems.” And these he blames on television – “the endlessly changing images, flickering like the attention spans of ADHD children.”

“Television: The Hidden Picture” – Rixon Stewart, via Handmaiden’s Kitchen