#Watch spongebob squarepants episodes nickelodeon series
#Watch spongebob squarepants episodes nickelodeon tv

#Watch spongebob squarepants episodes nickelodeon series

He began developing SpongeBob SquarePants into a television series in 1996 after the cancellation of Rocko's Modern Life, another Nickelodeon television series that Hillenburg previously directed. Many of the ideas for the show originated in an unpublished, educational comic book titled The Intertidal Zone, which Hillenburg created in the mid-1980s. The series is set in the fictional underwater city of Bikini Bottom, and centers on the adventures and endeavors of SpongeBob SquarePants, an over-optimistic sea sponge that annoys other characters. SpongeBob SquarePants is an American animated television series created by marine biologist and animator Stephen Hillenburg that premiered on Nickelodeon on May 1, 1999. 'There's no question that American children watch too much TV,' he says, but 'an hour or two of SpongeBob is way worse than two hours of Caillou.Stephen Hillenburg, shown here in 2011, created SpongeBob SquarePants, which premiered on May 1, 1999. But Christakis says what they're watching is as important as how much. The American Academy of Pediatrics says that parents should limit children's use of electronic media to no more than two hours a day. The theory is that overstimulation while a child's brain is developing makes it harder to focus on sustained tasks later on.

'It's overstimulation that causes the problem,' he says.

It's not SpongeBob himself who's the culprit, he says, but fast-paced or violent shows.

Christakis, who has conducted several of those studies, says that the findings of the new study are consistent with what he's found.

#Watch spongebob squarepants episodes nickelodeon tv

Other studies have found that children who watch a lot of TV as preschoolers have more problems with attention in the elementary-school years. (That test asks the preschoolers to resist eating a plateful of Goldfish crackers for 5 minutes, which would be hard for many members of the NPR Science Desk.)Д«ut the kids who watched SpongeBob, which changed scenes every 11 seconds, did significantly worse on the tests than either the children who colored, or those who watched educational TV. Neither of those groups had problems with the tests, which involved remembering a series of numbers, following rules, and delaying gratification. But they did compare the SpongeBob watchers to 20 children who watched Caillou, a slower-paced PBS show that features a sweet yet whiny preschooler.

That's a very small sample size, and it hardly reflects the real TV-watching habits of young children, who commonly watch two to five hours a day of TV.ДЄnd the researchers, psychologists Angeline Lillard and Jennifer Peterson of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, didn't measure if the problems with attention and executive function lasted. Just 20 4-year-olds were tested after watching the popular Nickolodeon show, and they watched it for nine minutes. He's a child development specialist at Seattle Children's Hospital who wrote a commentary on the new study, which was just published in the journal Pediatrics.Д«ut fans of the optimistic denizen of Bikini Bottom can take solace in the fact that the new study comes with a boatload of caveats. 'I would not encourage parents of a 4-year-old boy to have him watch SpongeBob right before he goes in for his kindergarten readiness assessment,' Dimitri Christakis told Shots. Parents may dote on the tragicomic adventures of SpongeBob SquarePants, but researchers say that that the cartoon's fast-based scenes may make it harder for young children to pay attention and think. SpongeBob Squarepants may be too much for little minds.Д«ryan Bedder/Getty Images for Nickelodeon