A new American study found that when babies of low income families are watching TV, mothers rarely interact with them.

The study author said that the "dramatic rise in the television programming directed toward young babies" made them develop the study partly.

Dr. Alan L. Mendelsohn, of the New York University School of Medicine, and colleagues said, "There has been a dramatic increase in television programming directed toward young infants. This has occurred despite recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics that children younger than 2 years should not watch any television. Much of this programming is marketed toward parents as 'educational,' despite limited data to support this assertion."

The study was published in the May issue of the Archives of Pediatrics & Internal Medicine.

The researchers found that over a 24 hour period, 149 of 154 mothers (96.8%,) reported that their six month old babies had a total of 426 exposures to television or videos.

These were as following:
a) 139 exposures (32.6%) to educational programs for young children.

b) 46 (10.8%) to non-educational programs for young children.

c) 205 (48.1%) to programs for school-aged children, teenagers or adults.

d) 36 (8.5%) to unknown programs.

The verbal interaction between mother and child were only reported 23.7% of the time during all TV viewing but, during child oriented media-when mothers were around it went up to 42.8% of interaction time.

The study however, found an important link between babies receiving less verbal and physical interaction when viewing any type of TV program. It also found that if mother and infant viewed the educational TV programs together, termed as co-viewing, they interacted with the infants 62.7% of the time.

The scientists conclude that if an infant is exposed to TV, they have very limited amounts of mother-infant interactions reported at one fourth of all TV viewing, the infant is exposed to.

"Consistent with our first hypothesis, interactions were most commonly reported in association with educational content, especially among programs that had been co-viewed," the researchers wrote. "However, approximately half of the exposures consisted of programs not intended for young children; these were not associated with frequent interactions even when they were co-viewed."

The researchers concluded, "Our findings are important, because parent-infant interactions are associated with long-term developmental-behavioral outcomes. Verbal responsiveness is frequently seen in association with reading and playing with toys. Given the large amount of media exposure and low frequency of reported interactions, additional study is needed to determine whether media exposure can facilitate interactions of sufficient quantity and quality to be associated with benefits for young children."

Another study conducted on 1000 families in Minnesota and Washington with babies by Frederick Zimmerman of the University of Washington and colleagues reveals that watching TV or video may be harmful for babies because, it may slow down the learning capacity of words.