Watching less television may curb children's appetites for new toys, suggest the results of a preliminary study.

"This small study indicates that reducing television viewing may be a particularly promising approach to reducing the influences of advertising on children's behavior," says lead author Thomas N. Robinson, M.D., M.P.H., of the Department of Pediatrics and Center for Research in Disease Prevention at Stanford University School of Medicine.

Children now see approximately 40,000 commercials a year, which is double the number children saw in the 1970s. Half of these commercials are toy advertisements, according to the study.

Approximately 200 third- and fourth-graders at two public elementary schools participated in the study. Students at one school received 18 brief classroom lessons to help them monitor, budget and reduce their television, videotape and video game usage. They were issued a challenge to avoid TV and video games for 10 days, and after completing the challenge they were encouraged to limit their use of these media to seven hours a week. Children at the other school participated in the study as the comparison group and received no extra curricula.

At the end of the study, all of the children were asked to list any toys they had seen on TV that they had asked their parents to buy in the past week. The parents were also queried as to the number of toy requests they had received from their children.

The children from the school that received the TV-reduction lessons were less likely to report asking their parents for toys than the children in the comparison school. But their parents did not notice a significant reduction in toy requests, Robinson and colleagues found.

The researchers say larger studies could help clarify the inconsistency between the parents' and children's reports. They note that about 30 percent of parents did not participate in the phone interviews and that only one parent for each child was interviewed. Interviewing both parents may give a more accurate picture of toy requests, the researchers say.

The study is published in the current issue of the Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics.

If future studies confirm these findings, the classroom curriculum used in this study may be effectively used to encourage kids to cut down on TV and reduce the influences of TV advertising on children, Robinson says.

"Despite substantial evidence of the effects of television advertising on children's consumeristic behavior, there has been a lack of successful methods to reduce this effect," the researcher say.

Previously reported findings from this study showed that children who received the TV-reduction lessons gained less body fat and were less aggressive than children in the comparison school, Robinson notes.

This study was funded by grants from the American Heart Association, the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute, and a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Generalist Physician Faculty Scholar Award.

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The Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics is published bimonthly by the Society for Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics. For information about the journal, contact Mary Sharkey at (212) 595-7717. For copies of the article, contact the Center for the Advancement of Health at 202.387.2829 or e-mail press@cfah.org