How many parents have gazed despairingly at their children who sit comatose in front of the TV for what seems like eons of uninterrupted viewing, their eyes glazed, their sallow faces awash in that bluish glow? Surely this is rotting their brains, wiping clean whole neural networks, all cognitive functioning flickering off, neuron by neuron and synapse by synapse with each ensuing episode of American Idol, The Apprentice, Survior, and The Biggest Loser. And instead of high-functioning, productive members of society of whom they can be justifiably proud, parents fear being saddled with zombies in hairnets, muttering “You want fries with that?” for the rest of their lives. And it’s all the TV’s fault, right?

Wrong. A new study by two economists from the University of Chicago, Matthew Fentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro, shows “very little difference and if anything, a slight positive advantage” in test scores for kids who grew up watching TV early on, as compared to kids who did not. And in households where English was a second language or the mom had less than a high school education, the positive effect of TV was even more pronounced. (This study was released by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a nonprofit, nonpartisan group of academic researchers in Cambridge, Massachusetts.)

New research also appears to debunk the notion that TV shortens children’s attention spans. A study recently published in the journal Pediatrics and based on American kindergartners, and another conducted in the Netherlands, found absolutely no link between television viewing and symptoms of attention-deficit disorder.