Should you kill your TV?
If there is a single thing that parents could do to enhance their children’s mental development, guarantee better communication at home, insure improved cooperation and concentration with homework, facilitate a more active healthy lifestyle and promote reading, you would think parents would jump at the chance to do it. Right? Wrong!
The thing to do would be to kill your television. Yet parents seem powerless to do anything about what is probably the single greatest deterrent to education. There have been upwards of 4,000 studies of the effects of television on children and I can find nothing positive in their results. Try a search for the positive effects of television on children, it appears as though the word positive is just dropped from the search. About the only positive mention I could find was that "high quality, nonviolent, children's shows can have a positive effect on learning." I challenge anyone to try to find even a half hour of that on television today, but don’t kid yourself, that’s not what kids are watching.
What you do find on any search involving television and children are countless examples of the negative impact of television.
Dr. Dimitri Christakis, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington, has gotten national attention with publication of a study that says it is dangerous to let our littlest kids watch any TV at all.
Christakis' research indicates that each hour a child under 3 spends staring at a TV each day results in a 10 percent chance that child will have attention problems by age 7. The speed of shifting images on TV produces abnormal changes in the brains of little tykes who stare at the tube too long.
Interview with Dr. Christakis
Ask any elementary school teacher about the number of children with attention problems in their classrooms right now. I have a percentage of students who can attend to very little in terms of class work, but observe them watching TV or playing video games and they are literally glued to the screen. Very young children are especially at risk:
A policy from the American Academy of Pediatrics urges parents to avoid television for children under two years of age.
"While certain television programs may be promoted to this age group, research on early brain development shows that babies and toddlers have a critical need for direct interactions with parents and other significant care givers for healthy brain growth and the development of appropriate social, emotional, and cognitive skills," the policy says.
The AAP statement also suggests parents create an "electronic media-free" environment in children's rooms, and avoid using media as an electronic babysitter.
Forty-nine percent of all Americans when responding to surveys say they watch too much TV. But it appears few do anything about it since viewing habits are on the rise. Current statistics show that on average a television is on 6 hours and forty-seven minutes daily per household. That’s obscene, it’s such an evasive, overpowering medium. It’s so demanding that people are drawn to it. The stats also show that the average person is actually watching it 4 hours per day!
My wife and I tossed out our television over twenty years ago. We decided to raise our children without the influence of television in their daily lives. We thought about monitoring it. But monitoring something like television that is temptingly available 24/7 is a daunting task. Is it really worth the effort? I knew that I would be a terrible monitor, so it was far easier to get rid of it entirely. A lot of folks claim they monitor the content and amount of TV their children watch, but I seriously wonder about that.
People claim they must have TV for news. I don’t think so. The newspapers offer plenty of news coverage and if you compare a couple of papers, you at least have an idea of the complete story. With TV you get news bites.
"Television is altering the meaning of "being informed" by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation... Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information - misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information - information that creates the illusion of knowing something, but which in fact leads one away from knowing."
Neil Postman
I certainly can do a better job of picking out the news that interests me than the networks can. I prefer to choose my news from the newspaper or the Internet, free of all the sensationalism and hype. I don’t need, want or care about the Scott Peterson trial, or the latest traffic fatality splattered across the highway. Yet with TV what choice do you have? You take the news the network decides to broadcast. The network decides what's important for you to see. No one will ever make that choice for me.
Once you make the break from television, you quickly come to realize just how trivial and mundane it really is. The old saying that the book is always better than the movie is quite true. It’s a shame that so many children today will never understand that. It takes a little effort and practice for a reader to get to the point where reading becomes infinitely more satisfying than watching. It’s a lot easier to get there without the nagging distraction of TV and it sure helps to have reading actually modeled at home. Most children will never get the opportunity to develop their reading ability to it’s fullest potential, or even a fraction of their potential, because their parents can’t turn off the TV.
Take a look at what television teaches kids.
The thing to do would be to kill your television. Yet parents seem powerless to do anything about what is probably the single greatest deterrent to education. There have been upwards of 4,000 studies of the effects of television on children and I can find nothing positive in their results. Try a search for the positive effects of television on children, it appears as though the word positive is just dropped from the search. About the only positive mention I could find was that "high quality, nonviolent, children's shows can have a positive effect on learning." I challenge anyone to try to find even a half hour of that on television today, but don’t kid yourself, that’s not what kids are watching.
What you do find on any search involving television and children are countless examples of the negative impact of television.
Dr. Dimitri Christakis, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington, has gotten national attention with publication of a study that says it is dangerous to let our littlest kids watch any TV at all.
Christakis' research indicates that each hour a child under 3 spends staring at a TV each day results in a 10 percent chance that child will have attention problems by age 7. The speed of shifting images on TV produces abnormal changes in the brains of little tykes who stare at the tube too long.
Interview with Dr. Christakis
Ask any elementary school teacher about the number of children with attention problems in their classrooms right now. I have a percentage of students who can attend to very little in terms of class work, but observe them watching TV or playing video games and they are literally glued to the screen. Very young children are especially at risk:
A policy from the American Academy of Pediatrics urges parents to avoid television for children under two years of age.
"While certain television programs may be promoted to this age group, research on early brain development shows that babies and toddlers have a critical need for direct interactions with parents and other significant care givers for healthy brain growth and the development of appropriate social, emotional, and cognitive skills," the policy says.
The AAP statement also suggests parents create an "electronic media-free" environment in children's rooms, and avoid using media as an electronic babysitter.
Forty-nine percent of all Americans when responding to surveys say they watch too much TV. But it appears few do anything about it since viewing habits are on the rise. Current statistics show that on average a television is on 6 hours and forty-seven minutes daily per household. That’s obscene, it’s such an evasive, overpowering medium. It’s so demanding that people are drawn to it. The stats also show that the average person is actually watching it 4 hours per day!
My wife and I tossed out our television over twenty years ago. We decided to raise our children without the influence of television in their daily lives. We thought about monitoring it. But monitoring something like television that is temptingly available 24/7 is a daunting task. Is it really worth the effort? I knew that I would be a terrible monitor, so it was far easier to get rid of it entirely. A lot of folks claim they monitor the content and amount of TV their children watch, but I seriously wonder about that.
People claim they must have TV for news. I don’t think so. The newspapers offer plenty of news coverage and if you compare a couple of papers, you at least have an idea of the complete story. With TV you get news bites.
"Television is altering the meaning of "being informed" by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation... Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information - misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information - information that creates the illusion of knowing something, but which in fact leads one away from knowing."
Neil Postman
I certainly can do a better job of picking out the news that interests me than the networks can. I prefer to choose my news from the newspaper or the Internet, free of all the sensationalism and hype. I don’t need, want or care about the Scott Peterson trial, or the latest traffic fatality splattered across the highway. Yet with TV what choice do you have? You take the news the network decides to broadcast. The network decides what's important for you to see. No one will ever make that choice for me.
Once you make the break from television, you quickly come to realize just how trivial and mundane it really is. The old saying that the book is always better than the movie is quite true. It’s a shame that so many children today will never understand that. It takes a little effort and practice for a reader to get to the point where reading becomes infinitely more satisfying than watching. It’s a lot easier to get there without the nagging distraction of TV and it sure helps to have reading actually modeled at home. Most children will never get the opportunity to develop their reading ability to it’s fullest potential, or even a fraction of their potential, because their parents can’t turn off the TV.
Take a look at what television teaches kids.
posted by Gary at 8:03 PM
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