Paul Smolen MD FAAP
Adjunct Associate Professor
UNC School of Medicine
DocSmo of Portable Practical Pediatrics
Charlotte, NC
A Real Life Story
Recently, I got a real-life lesson in the effects of media consumption on illness while helping my 93-year-old mother, a passionate Democrat, recover from a small stroke that occurred the day after the 2016 presidential election. Her stroke a coincidence, you say? I thought so too, but I have become convinced otherwise.
According to her doctors, the triggering event for my mother’s stroke was severe hypertension – 212/110 upon arrival at the ED.
Since her discharge and recovery, we have been monitoring her blood pressure carefully, and here is the strange thing I have noticed: her blood pressure while at home watching “cable news” is invariably high, but when we take her to a medical facility, away from the television, her blood pressure normalizes. I’ve coined a name for this phenomenon: “The Cable News Hypertension Syndrome” or CNHS. Simply watching cable news seems to cause my mother to develop a malignant spike in her blood pressure.
The Mind Body Connection
How can exposure to images, music, sound effects, and dialogue cause such a strong physical response adversely affecting someone’s health? We have all heard of the severe and devastating long-term health effects of real life adverse childhood experiences (or ACE factors).
Children exposed to ACE factors tend to have; higher cortisol levels, higher blood pressure, higher sympathetic tone, and less well developed self control than children who have not endured such exposure.
Could exposure to emotionally charged events such as images of terrorism and war on TV, have the same deleterious influence on a child? Could watching carefully crafted, emotionally charged television content have negative effects on children just like on my mother? Of course. Evidence already exists that, in children between the ages of three and eight years of age, watching television has the effect of raising blood pressure, independent of whether the children are obese or not.
Big Brother is Watching
To make matters worse, the invention of the internet, social media, and big data has magnified the effect of media on all of us. In today’s world, when children watch something on TV, a website, or YouTube, the producers of that content are measuring not only the size of their audience but often the emotional response of the audience to their content. They are tweaking content to maximize its emotional and physical impact on viewership, the better to attract and benefit advertisers.
Orwellian you say? You bet. Ever wonder why news outlets give their articles away on your Facebook feed? You used to have to buy the paper or magazine to read these articles. No more. They “give” them to you because the publishers are collecting data on what interests you and learning how to connect with you emotionally via your likes and shares.
The same is true for children. Even the words children use in social media posts are analyzed and sold to advertisers. Think Google and Facebook are just ways of connecting children with information and their friends? While they do achieve this goal, they are also some of the largest advertising companies in the world, targeting children with laser-like precision.
Parents Need to Take Control of the Messages
Instant access to information and entertainment is fundamentally changing childhood in the United States. Ever more adroit media companies, combined with ubiquitous access to screens, are gradually eroding the influence of family members on the emotional and physical development of children. Unless parents actively understand and deflect the new media reality, many will lose control of the most important positive influence a child can have: the time and attention of their parents.
Just as my mother’s example demonstrates, exposure to media with strong emotional messages can be harmful to one’s health. We have known about the potentially negative effects of media consumption on the health of children for some time. Childhood obesity, sleep difficulties, and greater childhood aggression have all been correlated with high media consumption during childhood. My advice to today’s parents is the same as the advice I gave my mother after her stroke, “Turn off the TV mom”.
