This paper summarizes a series of studies investigating the nature of children's attention to television. In a study of distraction, children's visual attention was found to be affected by distractions in the environment, by the nature of the program and by the viewer's own patterns of attending. A study of the general patterns of attention to television revealed that children have an inertial tendency such that they can become "locked in" to TV viewing. The longer a child had been visually attentive, the greater the probability s/he would continue that attention. This phenomenon was labeled "attentional inertia." Another study investigated the conditional probability of looking back at the television as a function of time since the end of the last look. Again, results indicated the operation of attentional inertia. This phenomenon was also present in a study done with college student subjects. The possibility of generalizing attentional inertia beyond television watching is discussed. (SB)