NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Cutting down on kids' TV time may relieve parents of their little ones' toy demands. New research suggests that the fewer commercials children see, the less materialistic they become.

For decades, there has been concern about the number of television ads American children are exposed to. Since the 1970s, the average number of commercials a child sees in a year has doubled, from about 20,000 to 40,000, according to a report in the June issue of the Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics. And since half of ads geared toward children hawk toys, the situation is helping to drain parents' wallets.

"It is...not surprising that parents report that television is the most common source of children's purchase requests," write Dr. Thomas N. Robinson of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, and colleagues.

To see whether such purchase requests would decline if TV time did, Robinson's team staged a "classroom intervention" among third- and fourth-graders at two public schools. Participants at one school went through a 6-month curriculum aimed at reducing their exposure to television, videos and video games. At the beginning and end of the school year, children and parents at both schools reported on the students' recent TV-inspired toy requests.

By the end of the study, children at the intervention school had cut their TV viewing by about one-third, on average. What's more, the kiddies' toy demands had fallen, according to parents' and children's reports. They were 70% less likely than children at the other school to have asked their parents for a toy in the previous week, Robinson's team reports.

These results, the researchers add, are "evidence for a causal effect" of TV viewing on children's hunger for toys.

"This small study indicates that reducing television viewing may be a particularly promising approach to reducing the influences of advertising on children's behavior," Robinson and colleagues conclude.

SOURCE: Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics 2001;22:179-