This is an interesting story about an unnecessarily flawed study. The research found that weekday TV and video game use, not surprisingly, correlates with kids’ school performance. But during weekends, only 4+ hours each day will harm a child’s work.

When I was a kid my parents limited my Nintendo time to four hours total on weekends, so they were apparently three times stricter than they needed to be. (And I wondered why I could never beat very many games.)

The problem is that the study relied on kids’ self-reports of “below average” to “excellent” work. I don’t doubt that these ratings roughly correspond to actual performance, but how difficult could it possibly be to ask for copies of the report cards? It’s just lazy.

I also wish the study controlled for intelligence. It’s possible that lower-IQ parents, who tend to have lower-IQ kids, are less strict about overexposure to entertainment media — and that the brainpower, not the PlayStation, affects kids’ perceptions of their school performance. This would have been another fairly simple (if not as easy as asking “can I get a Xerox of your grades?”) adjustment to the study.

Another interesting finding is that R-rated movies hurt school performance, with a more pronounced effect seen in boys. My theory, the obvious one, is that violence and sex are more likely to gin up a tendency for distracting behavior in a testosterone-laden male than in a female.

Robert VerBruggen blogs at http://robertsrationale.blogspot.com.