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In the immortal words of nerve-wracked undersea driving instructor Mrs. Puff: "Oh SpongeBob!"
Our favorite gap-toothed sea dweller is in trouble these days. Like high-calorie junk food and secondhand cigarette smoke, he's been found to be a credible threat to our children's health and well-being.
SpongeBob SquarePants and his Bikini Bottom brethren's cartoons can cause problems in 4-year-olds after just nine minutes of viewing -- not even half the length of the standard episode -- according to researchers from the University of Virginia.
In a study published in Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, Angeline S. Lillard and Jennifer Peterson found that those nine minutes were all it took for kids who watched fast-paced television cartoons to perform significantly worse on attention, time management and memory tasks, compared to children who watched a moderately paced educational cartoon.
Lillard and Peterson quantified what I...