Dangerous SpongeBob

Do you ever watch the SpongeBob SquarePants cartoon show? The cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants is amusing and has a few jokes directed to the adults in the audience too. The best cartoons are friendly to all ages in the audience. When my daughter Jane was small I watched many episodes of it and came to like the show very much. I think it was because I could relate to the dense but pragmatic 'Patrick' character. Patrick may be dumb, but his stupidity sometimes makes sense. We are all Patrick to one degree or another.

Well, SpongeBob is out of the ocean and in "hot water" now after one of those never endless and pointless studies suggested that watching just nine minutes of that program can cause short-term attention and learning problems in 4-year-olds. I won't go through the study dynamics because it was not reliably done. Suffice to say, the study tested the 4 year olds after watching 4 minutes of SpongeBob, and tested them again after they watched 4 minutes of an "educational" cartoon show called 'Caillou'.

Those who had watched "SpongeBob" did much worse than those Caillou brats. (But Sponge Bob is a cartoon, Caillou while a cartoon is also suppose to be a learning show..... seems an inappropriate comparison for judging intellectual gain or loss)
Hmmm I wonder what the test results for adults would be after watching any TV news program when compared to their viewing a sporting event. I think the news program would produce many more confused, angry, anxious and disturbed people than the sports event. Should we stop adults from watching the TV newscasts as the study says we should ban kids from seeing SpongeBob? Too, if they tested you after reading what I write you would probably be labeled as learning disabled. This attack on a mythical sponge has gone too far!

The authors of this study obviously don't spend much time around 4-year-olds. If they think that Sponge Bob causes this instead of those kids hitting each other in the head with plastic toys, being screamed at by mom and dad, or listening to baby talk from grandma. (and I swear that get brain lock just from listening to Barrack Obama's weekly hope and change speeches).

Better to study a much stronger cause and effect in kid brains development....the parent. Seems to me (and I don't need a study to confirm this) that bad parents, not cartoons, are the ones who most often injure the minds, bodies and souls of children.