Television has become such a major part of life that many American parents use it as a babysitter. A new study shows that almost one-third of families have TVs in children's bedrooms, and the number of television programs geared toward infants is growing.

电视现在变成了生活中如此重要的一部分，许多美国的父母使用电视来照看孩子。一项新的研究表明在几乎三分之一的家庭里，孩子的卧室里都有电视，面向婴儿的电视节目在不断增加。

Katie Weaver has her hands full. Four children in her kitchen, and two of them are hers. All of them are under the age of six, and thirsty at the same time. It's enough to get on the nerves of any adult. Like many of the 1,000 parents surveyed in a Kaiser Family Foundation study, Katie admits she sometimes uses TV as a pacifier when her children are overly- excited and it usually works.

凯蒂忙得不可开交。厨房里有四个孩子，其中两个是她的。这些孩子都在六岁以下，都在同一时间口渴，这足以让任何成人感到烦躁。凯撒家庭基金会曾经对1000个父母进行了调查，像里面的许多人一样，凯蒂承认，有时候当孩子过于吵闹时，她会用电视来安抚孩子，通常这个办法还很管用。

“I don't use it as a babysitter because they don't watch enough or long enough for that, but if they are very hyped up, sometimes I'll use TV to calm them down, ” she said. While there has been some concern that watching too much television fosters obesity in children, the long-term effects of parking a very young child in front of the “tube” are not clear.

“我没有使用电视来照看小孩，因为他们不会长时间看电视，但如果他们过于兴奋，有时我会用电视让他们平静下来”， 她说。尽管有人担心，看电视时间太长会导致儿童肥胖，但长期影响尚不明确。

“A lot of them are two-parent working families, so we're talking about having very little time with the children. If that time is used in front of a screen, rather than interactively, it's compromising the way these children are learning to pay attention, the way they're learning to problem-solve, and most importantly, the way they're learning to think and use language, ” said Greenspan, who is the expert of the Kaiser Family Foundation study.

格林斯潘是凯撒家庭基金会的研究专家， 他说：“这么做的家庭通常是父母俩人都工作，也就是父母和孩子可以共处的时间很少。如果这些时间被用来看电视，而不是与孩子进行互动，这影响着孩子集中注意力的能力、解决问题的能力，更重要的是，影响着他们的思维和语言表达能力。”

In the survey, parents of children much younger, up to a year old, report viewing averages of an hour per day. For kids one to two years, it's close to an hour and a half. Greenspan believes babies and children under the age of two should not be watching at all and he's worried that some parents are concealing the real truth. “If anything, it's an underestimation, because if a kid's watching two hours, they might say an hour. So I think what we're getting is a minimal estimate, ” he said.

在调查中，不到一岁孩子的父母们报告说他们的孩子每天平均看一个小时电视。对于一到两岁的孩子，看电视时间接近一个半小时。格林斯潘认为两岁以下的孩子根本不应该看电视，他担心其中一些父母没说实话，“或者是他们估计不足，如果孩子看两个小时的电视，他们会说只看了一个小时。所以我认为，我们得到的只是最低估算”，他说。

Television programming for very young children has been increasing. Yet one researcher involved in the Kaiser study says there is still no evidence that children up to the age of two learn anything of value from television.

为年幼孩子开设的电视节目一直在增加，但是凯撒家庭基金会的一位研究专家说没有证据证明不到两岁的孩子能从电视中学到有价值的东西。