Watching television makes little girls and black kids feel bad about themselves, but it makes white boys more confident, a new study has found.

The Indiana University study compared 400 children's reports of self-esteem with time spent in front of the TV.

They found the more time kids spent watching the boob tube, the greater the impact on their self-esteem. For white boys, that's a good thing.

"Regardless of what show you're watching, if you're a white male, things in life are pretty good for you," co-author Nicole Martins said in a press release, referring to the white characters depicted on television. "You tend to be in positions of power, you have prestigious occupations, high education, glamorous houses, a beautiful wife, with very little portrayals of how hard you worked to get there."

For black boys — who are faced with images of black criminals and buffoons — it's not so positive, Martins said.

"Young black boys are getting the opposite message: that there is not lots of good things that you can aspire to," she said. "If we think about those kinds of messages, that's what's responsible for the impact."

And girls of both races are negatively affected by what they see.

"If you are a girl or a woman, what you see is that women on television are not given a variety of roles," Martins said.

"The roles that they see are pretty simplistic; they're almost always one-dimensional and focused on the success they have because of how they look, not what they do or what they think or how they got there. This sexualization of women presumably leads to this negative impact on girls."