I’ll give you one guess to answer that question. You guessed it. The answer is, “Yes!” A new study shows the relationship between the amount of time in front of the television and the nature of the relationship with mom and dad.

It doesn’t seem like it would require very much research to find out that the longer kids watch television or stare into a computer screen (for leisure), the more their relationships will suffer. The recent studies come to us from New Zealand. More than 3,000 participants were asked about several screen time activities: television, video games, and computer time. Those same teenagers were also surveyed about their relationships with their parents and their peers.

Here’s what they found:

For every hour spent watching TV, the teens’ risk for having a low quality attachment to their parents increased by 4 percent. And for computer use, the risk increased 5 percent per hour. Low quality attachment means the teens had difficulty forming relationships and emotional bonds with others.

It’s interesting to note that the screen time did not affect relationships with friends. However, researchers say that they are not sure why screen time affects relationships with parents so much. Some say it’s because the time spent in front of the television or the computer screen is time that would normally be spent at dinner or family time in the evening. Others say that it could be that it is the poor relationships with parents that drives kids to create relationships with people and characters online, on games or on television.

In either case, teenagers substitute a fantasy for reality in their lives. Regardless of which came first, their relationships will suffer. Why do relationships with parents hurt more than those with their friends? Perhaps screen time is not as readily available at school and are actually forced to speak with people face to face? Or, perhaps some of what they are watching on those screens actually undermines parents? Have you seen any popular television shows lately? Movies? Music? It’s all the same. It’s no more “Leave it to Beaver” or “The Waltons.” Parents are dorky, irrelevant, self absorbed, and stupid if you pay attention to the portrait of parents in the media. Is it possible those images are affecting some already lonely teens?

That said, I don’t believe that television has to be the bad guy all the time. I know families who have meaningful family time together and include their favorite television programs as part of their family time. They watch American Idol with their children and everybody talks (or debates) about it and votes after the show. They watch a sitcom like, “The Office,” and then talk about the moment they thought was funniest after the show. I’ve been with them for some of their family time and I don’t get the impression at all that television takes away from the relationships they have.

However, for the teenagers who took part in the study, the numbers don’t lie. It is for that reason that if we have children of any age, it’s worth taking a good, hard look at the way in which and the amount of which television is viewed in our homes.

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(Original photo by Jason Rogers, used under Creative Commons license.)