Children say they like playing with their friends most of all, but that's not what they're actually doing. In fact, they may spend at least as much time in front of the television and playing computer games as they do at school lessons.

Triplets Alice, Mabel and Phoebe live in a house where the TV is always on - they go to sleep in front of it every night. Their mum Tracey has six children to care for, plus a job of her own. She says the TV is a godsend. She also thinks that it doesn't matter what the children watch, because anything that's not suitable just goes over their heads. Is she right? In an original - and amusing - experiment, we show the children scenes from soap operas to see how much of the narratives they follow.

Megan Davies lives on a farm in Wales. A lot of her time is spent with her parents while they're working with the livestock. Does all this time outdoors mean she's especially active?

We test the children for their activity levels, and find some rather surprising results. Jamie Craven is a football and cycling-mad boy from Lancashire, and our most active child. But his active lifestyle is suddenly threatened - can he maintain it despite all the odds?

Ethan adores violent computer games. But what are they doing to him? There are fears that playing such games might encourage children to be violent themselves.

We use ground-breaking experiments to show what skills Ethan and the other children might be gaining from their exposure to new technology. And we also ask how playing exciting computer games might affect children when they go to school full-time.

This BBC/Open University co-production is the second programme in series five and will be shown on BBC1 on Tuesday 11 January 2005.