SpongeBob before they take the kindergarten entrance test," he jokes. "At a minimum, parents shouldn't have their kid watch For example, an episode titled Sailor Mouth contained cursing, at the very beginning of the episode SpongeBob was told to take out the garbage by Mr. Christakis notes that more research is needed to answer many questions, including whether these effects are long lasting. Some episodes of SpongeBob SquarePants contained some humor that could be considered by many parents around the world as dirty or inappropriate for children. "You're asking your brain to process something it's not well suited to. Christakis calls this "supernatural pacing." The slower show changed scenes on average every 34 seconds, while the speedy clip changed every 11 seconds. Christakis says the likeliest explanation is overstimulation. SpongeBob scored about 10 per cent lower than the other two groups.ĭr. Christakis says the PBS show is likelyĪfter a number of cognitive tests, children who watched preschool boy," or watch part of an episode of a "very popular fantastical cartoon about an animated sponge that lives under the sea," the authors wrote in the paper. In the experiment, psychology researchers at the University of Virginia asked three groups of four-year-olds to either sit and draw, watch part of a PBS show "about a typical U.S. It's about changing the channel, " says Dimitri Christakis, the director of the Seattle Children's Research Institute, who wrote an accompanying editorial in the journal Pediatrics. It's about more than turning off the television. "Most parents focus more on quantity than they do on content.
Why are the new spongebob episodes so bad series#
SpongeBob SquarePants is a bad influence.Ī research study has found that watching even nine minutes of the fast-paced cartoon can have immediate negative effects on a preschooler's brain function.Ĭompared with children who watched a sleepier cartoon or children who watched none, four-year-olds who watched the frenetic show did significantly worse on a series of tests measuring the brain's executive function, the umbrella term for the collection of skills including attention, working memory and self-regulation that are strongly associated with academic success.