On Monday, The Royal College of Psychiatrists called on the media to stop promoting unhealthy body images and glamorizing eating disorders. Recognizing that the media contributed to unhealthy body image and eating disorders, the group has asked for three changes:

1. More people with diverse body shapes represented by advertisers and in the press.

2. Putting an end to the use of underweight models.

3. The use of a kite mark scheme to alert readers when an image has been digitally manipulated or airbrushed.

According to Dr. Adrienne Key of the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ Eating Disorders Section, “There is a growing body of research that shows the media plays a part in the development of eating disorder symptoms – particularly in adolescents and young people.” Studies have shown that there is a direct correlation between how much exposure a female has to contemporary media and the frequency of eating disordered symptoms she experiences. One study in which women viewed slides of overweight, average, and thin models found that exposure to thin models resulted in lower self-esteem and decreased weight satisfaction. As bad as that statistic shows this situation is for adult women, children are even more vulnerable.

Up to half of the older elementary school girls read teen magazines at least occasionally and one quarter read them twice a week. Often, the girls will read these magazine to get ideas of how they “should” look. One study of eight to 11 year old girls found that they regularly compared themselves to fashion models and other media images and felt bad about the comparison.

In other cultures, outside of the United States, the rate of eating disorders has risen in direct correlation to the influx of American exports, such as television programs and feature films, which bring with them new concepts of beauty and femininity as well as Western clothing, which is geared towards the slimmer figures. For example, in Fiji, after being exposed to American television for only three years, Fijian teens who had never before been exposed to Western culture experienced significant changes in their attitudes and behaviors towards food and body image. In this culture where a comment like “you look fat today” was once considered a compliment, the standard of attractiveness has changed. As a result, the teen risk for eating disorders quickly doubled to 29 percent, while 15 percent of Fijian high school girls started vomiting for weight control (a five fold increase), 74 percent of Fijian teens said they felt “too big or too fat” at least some of the time, and 62 percent said they had dieted in the past month. The less time your children are spending exposed to media images the better off they will be.

Holding and rocking a baby is very instinctual and any parent knows it feels wonderful. But did you know that it is also advantageous to your child’s development? Here are a few reasons why:

1. It helps digestion. According the Ashley Montagu, author of the book Touching: The Human Significance of Skin, rocking assists the movement of the intestine like a pendulum and thus serves to improve digestion and absorption.

2. It calms the baby. Researchers have found that we naturally rock our babies at the same 60-70 cycles per minute pace that they experience in utero. Also, the synchrony that tends to result in the parent and infants heart rate recreates the familiar environment that was so soothing in utero.

3. It helps the inner ear. Part of the calming effect comes from the inner ear, which maintains equilibrium. Rocking helps infants to find their place in space and ultimately to keep their heads up in a neutral position.

4. It helps promote healthy weight gain. A study of twins, where one twin was rocked thirty minutes twice a day and the other was not rocked at all, found that the rocked infant gained weight faster than the non-rocked twin in every single instance.

5. Rocked infants are better able to track visual and auditory stimuli. Professor Mary Neal’s study of rocked infants found that, not only were rocked infants better able to follow visual and auditory stimuli but, they also gained more weight than non-rocked infants in a control group.

6. It helps circulation. According to Montagu, “Rocking, in both babies and adults, increases cardiac output and is helpful to circulation; it promotes respiration and discourages lung congestion; [and] it stimulates muscle tone….”

So after three years, three months, two weeks and five days of a screen-free existence (not even as background noise), my daughters Quincy and Mendez watched television for the first time. Why did we wait so long to introduce them to videos, movies and television programs you might wonder? Isn’t it educational? Aren’t there benefits? Well, for children under the age of three, not so much. Even The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that parents wait until at least two years of age.

In the past five years I have spent a lot of time reading research on the effects of television on young minds and have come to the conclusion that children are best served by waiting to watch television until they are at least three years old. I feel strongly about the value of waiting and have written extensively about the reasons I found compelling in my “Dr. Jenn” column in Los Angeles Family Magazine, my book The A to Z Guide to Raising Happy Confident Kids , and in my upcoming book SuperBaby: 12 Ways to Give Your Child a Head Start in the First 3 Years.

But I digress. Back to my own experience in opening this virtual Pandora’s box. Prior to introducing it, my husband and I decided to do a few things:

We made a screen time plan. We decided that television would not be a normal, daily event; that we would only watch it one time each week and that it would only be for a maximum of 30 minutes. We let our children know this plan in advance.

We chose commercial-free shows. By choosing a DVD or a show on the DVR, parents can avoid advertising which targets children, especially children of an age that don’t yet understand the difference between programming and commercials. These damaging, targeted commercials are incredibly effective at convincing them they need to make their parents buy their products and low nutrient foods in order to be happy.

We prescreened the shows. In addition to reading reviews and looking at the literature about children’s programming, we pre-screened the shows to make sure there wasn’t anything objectionable to us or which did not meet our parenting values or philosophy.

We made the experience an event. We decided that television viewing would be done as a family and that the children would never watch by themselves. We engaged our kids during the program by asking them about things in the program and followed up by doing activities related to the shows so that they would have a multidimensional experience.

So what did we watch? This has been the most frequent question I have been asked. The first two times we sat the kids down to watch TV, we watched Signing Time! which is one of my favorite children’s series. The show is filled with catchy music and sign language, the images are not overwhelming, the children are diverse in look and ethnicity and the messages are sweet. Our children have been listening to Signing Time! CDs and reading Signing Time! books since they were babies so this was an easy first step for us. Week one we watched Everyday Signs and week two we watched ABC Signs.

The next time we watched a video called Wonder Pets which is a terrific, operetta-like cartoon about animals who help save other animals. While we watched the show we occasionally stopped to try new signs or talk about what was happening, which took the experience of sitting and watching from being a completely passive time to an interactive and engaging activity and opportunity for bonding and learning with your kids. We also spent some time after watching Signing Time! listening to the CDs and practicing our signing.

So far this has been a very positive experience for both kids and parents. I can see how easy it would be to use the television as a babysitter or to turn it on when we are out of creative parenting ideas (or energy). However, we have made a commitment to do our best to provide interesting and educational moments so it is important to us to make our television experience both entertaining as well as a learning opportunity. I am especially excited for my kids to see things that they would not normally see in their own environment such as baby animals in the Serengeti, Olympic figure skaters, and foreign cultures and locales.

Between Tiger Woods’ many affairs, former presidential candidate John Edwards denying being the baby daddy to his mistresses’ two year old child, Charlie Sheen’s alleged domestic violence and Governor Mark Sanford’s highly publicized tryst in Buenos Aires, people have been asking me a lot about forgiveness.

While marital infidelity is never acceptable, there is a big difference between an impulsive, one time, drunken mistake and an ongoing, lengthy affair that involves ongoing lies and deceit. It was not surprising that Jenny Sanford filed for divorce last month given the level and frequency of deception in this case which was off the charts and from which it would have been nearly impossible to recover.

 Thinking about forgiving someone who has harmed you? Here are the four “R’s” I recommend you examine before deciding whether or not to forgive:

1. Take responsibility. Has the person taken responsibility for their actions or are they still blaming, accusing or making excesses?
2. Show remorse. Does the person seem genuinely sorry for what they have done or are they just paying you lip service? Do they seem to genuinely understand why what they did was wrong and how it has harmed others?
3. Take steps to avoid repeating the same kind of mistake. What is being done to assure the same mistake is not going to happen again? Has the person started therapy or religious counseling? Has s/he agreed to stop spending time with someone with whom they have experienced temptation? Has s/he agreed to be open and candid with information, emails, cell phone information or remove him/herself from social networking sites?
4. Work to repair the damage. A commitment to the relationship and working to repair the damage caused are important parts of moving forward. It takes time to heal broken trust.

 There is one exception to all of this and that is domestic violence. Domestic violence is a deal breaker. Regardless of promises, it is likely to escalate and can end in murder. According to the FBI, one third of all murder victims are killed by an intimate partner. If you are experiencing domestic violence you can call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1−800−799−SAFE (7233) or TTY 1−800−787−3224 for help.

An article in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times entitled Hours Sitting in Front of TV Found to Shorten Life revealed the results of a new study that found that each hour per day spent watching TV was linked with an 18% increased risk of death from cardiovascular disease and a 9% increased risk of death from cancer. The study also revealed that people who watch more than four hours of television each day have an 80% greater risk of death from cardiovascular disease and a 46% higher risk of death overall when compared with those who watch fewer than two hours a day.

Another LA Times article that came out in October called Kids Watch More Than a Day of TV Each Week revealed the latest Nielson numbers which found that television usage by children has reached an eight year high with children ages 2 to 5 watching an average of more than 32 hours each week, on average. Some quick math reveals that that is an average of more than four and a half hours every day, putting those children in the 80% greater risk of death from cardiovascular disease category.

We know a sedentary lifestyle puts us, and our kids, at risk. In fact, experts warn that this may be the first generation of children who are outlived by their own parents. At an American Medical Association press briefing, Dr. William Dietz, Director of the Division of Nutrition and Physical Activity reported that six out of ten children today have a quantifiable risk factor for heart disease by the time they are 10 years old. “The more TV children view, the more likely they are to be overweight,” he says. “Reduction in TV viewing constitutes the single most effective way for children to lose weight.” A shocking study of the impact of television viewing which followed children from birth through adolescence reported that television viewing is the single greatest predictor of childhood obesity, even more than nutritional intake or physical activity.

After I wrote the articles TV’s Attack on Your Child’s Health for Los Angeles Family Magazine and Television and Your Child: What Every Parent Needs to Know, I started to seriously question how much television I wanted to expose my children to. But having grown up with a television in my bedroom, I couldn’t image not letting them watch. We live in a media saturated culture but, by the time my twin daughters were born in October of 2006, my husband and I made a choice not to let them watch television at all for the first two years. We made a plan to reevaluate every year. My children are now 3 years old and have never watched TV. I realize that this may make us a bit unusual as a family, but the benefits have been tremendous. Study after study show that children who do not watch television have better vocabularies, increased attention spans, more creativity and fewer health risks. My family has gotten to see many of those results first hand. Considering trying it in your home?

For more information about this issue check out :

The A to Z Guide to Raising Happy Confident Kids

SuperBaby: 12 Ways to Give Your Child a Head Start in the First 3 Years

The Elephant in the Living Room: Make Television Work For Your Kids

Endangered Minds: Why Children Don’t Think and What We Can Do About It

Remotely Controlled: How Television Is Damaging Our Lives

Into the Minds of Babes: How Screen Time Affects Children From Birth to Age Five

If you are thinking about going cold-turkey, check out these great reads:

The Big Turnoff: Confessions of a TV-Addicted Mom Trying to Raise a TV-Free Kid

Living Outside the Box: TV-Free Families Share Their Secrets

Living Without the Screen: Causes and Consequences of Life Without Television

Today I was on Issues with Jane Velez-Mitchell  discussing the Michael Brewer case. According to police reports 15-year-old Brewer owed Matthew Bent $40 for a video game, so Bent tried to steal Brewer’s dad’s bike as compensation. Brewer’s family had Bent arrested. The next day, Michael was approached by five 15-and-13 year-old boys, including Bent.

1. Denver Colorado Jarvis, age 15;
2. Jeremy Jarvis (Denver’s brother), age 13;
3. Steven Shelton, age 15
4. Jesus Mendez, age 15
5. Mathew Bent, age 15

Bent allegedly called Brewer a “rat,” surrounded him with the other boys, ordered rubbing alcohol to be poured on him, which the 13-year-old did, and then set him on fire resulting in severe burns over more than 65 percent of his body. According to Dr. Nicholas Namias, the head of the burn unit at Jackson Memorial Hospital because of the extensive burns Brewer is at a risk for infection and is expected to experience organ failures. They believe it will be hard to conduct skin grafts to repair damaged areas, since grafting best succeeds when the patient’s own skin is used and Brewer does not have enough available healthy skin left. Deputies report that the only boy to show remorse after the incident was Jesus Mendez, who was the one who actually set Brewer on fire. The rest- including Jarvis- were reportedly heard laughing about the assault after their arrests.

On the show Jeremy Jarvis’ attorney Stephen Melnick claimed that the attack was not planned. How many 15 year old boys do you know who carry around rubbing alcohol and matches? I don’t know any. 

Some argue that these boys didn’t know what they were doing, that they were too young to understand. As I said on the show, these were not 5-year-old boys who had no understanding of what they were doing. These teenagers, a few years from being adults, clearly understood that when you light someone on fire, they burn, it hurts them and it can kill them. We have to hold them responsible.

Criminal Defense Attorney Mark Eiglarsh  pointed out that the frontal lobe, the portion of the brain that governs reasoning, is not fully developed yet in children so they make “stupid, even horrific, tragic decisions …like this.” I completely disagree; they make immature mistakes like riding a bike without a helmet, jumping off a tall tree, drinking too much beer at a party, or practicing unsafe sex. They don’t douse their friends with alcohol and light them on fire. To conduct an act like that takes such a complete lack of a conscience that is falls into a completely different category that is deeply pathological.

Unfortunately, I think we are going to see more heartless crimes like this committed by children. There seems to be a huge disconnect. Most kids today spend more time text messaging, watching television, playing video games, listening to music on an MP3 player, using Facebook or playing on the internet than having meaningful face to face connections with people, including their parents. All those technologies and media formats are terrific and they even have a place in a teenager’s life but not at the expense of relationships and connection.

Click here for transcripts of the show.