The risks of reading nursery rhymes to children have been outlined in a new study that considers whether the rhymes innocently recited by parents for generations might lead to violent behaviour later in life. Dick Ahlstrom, Science Editor, reports.
The study found that depictions of violence per hour occurred 11 times more frequently in the "innocent" rhymes than on pre-watershed television. The authors raised concerns in particular about in Six in a Bed, Simple Simon and Jack and Jill.
The study is published this morning in the peer-reviewed British Medical Journal publication Archives of Disease in Childhood. Entitled, "Could nursery rhymes cause violent behaviour? A comparison with television viewing", the authors included 25 rhymes taken from a popular audio compilation of rhymes.
These rhymes were compared in turn with television-viewing data compiled by Ofcom, the independent regulator for the UK communications industries. It included two weeks of viewing on the five terrestrial UK channels in 2001 occurring between 5.30 p.m. and 9 p.m., when children were more likely to be watching.
The issue is no laughing matter given that about one in 10 violent crimes in England and Wales are perpetrated by school-age children, the authors note. Even apparently innocuous childhood presentations represent a risk.
"The Harry Potter books contain examples of bullying, fighting, theft, subversion, lying and murder," they write.
The nursery rhyme/television comparisons provide compelling evidence in the case against such literature. They recorded 1,045 episodes of TV violence, matching this with violent depictions in the 23 minutes required to recite the 25 nursery rhymes to a member of the research team. Half of the TV programmes contained violence compared with 44 per cent of the rhymes, they found. However the levels of accidental and aggressive violence were twice as high in the nursery rhymes as on TV. Altogether there were almost five violent scenes per hour on TV but more than 52 per hour when listening to nursery rhymes.
They conclude that children were exposed to violent episodes long before TV arrived, and as a result, "laying the blame [for childhood violence] solely on television viewing is simplistic.