Television And Children

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Friends walked into our house last year, noted our television was missing from any main rooms, and quipped, "We give you a week. It'll be back!" They were wrong!!!

by Lisa Reagan

It's a year later, and the television isn't back. It wasn't that we made an informed, self-congratulating decision to take television out of our lives; it was just that the &^%#$ cable company missed our turn-on date three times! After our third turn-on date, and four weeks with no TV had passed, my husband and I sulkily surrendered to divine intervention: We were not destined for the Discovery Channel.

Miraculously, we made it through this withdrawal period by developing other rituals with our discovery of TIME. More time for everything. More time for cooking healthy dinners, more time for walks, drives, journal entries, the perennial parade of household chores, and of course, more time for our wonderful toddler son. More time meant less stress. And with more still-fleeting time on our hands, our lives became rich with the contact of each other.

Before the gods took cable television out of our home, we would have sworn that we didn't watch "that much TV." It is only now, with 20/20 hindsight, that we realize the amount of time we spent watching television and it's powerful, all-consuming effect on our lives. After 12 TV-free months, I was so inspired by our family's rebirth -- and with the American Academy of Pediatrics recent announcement that two year-olds under should not watch television -- that I hit our local library for information. Here is what I found:

In their August 1999 policy statement the AAP urged parents "to avoid television for children under two years old," to "create an 'electronic media-free' environment in children's bedrooms," and "avoid using media as an electronic babysitter." In addition, it recommends pediatricians incorporate a "Media History Form" into routine child health visits.

Even though the AAP's policy may seem extreme, it actually occupies the middle of the road. In my library search I found arguments for virtually banning television from your home, for becoming "media literate", or for rejecting "mediaphobes" and letting your children watch anything they want.

Media literacy advocates and television banners disagree over whether or not the content of children's programs matters. According to Joseph Chilton Pearce, author of Evolution's End: Claiming the Potential of Our Intelligence, it doesn't matter if your child watches Sesame Street or Power Rangers: "The major damage of television has little to do with content: It's damage is neurological."

Both camps do agree on television's effect on a child's brain. Our "triune system" consists of the reptilian system, old mammalian, and new mammalian brains that control action, feeling, and thought, respectively. "The third and highest member, our neocortex, or new brain, is five times bigger than its two lower neighbors combined and provides intellect, creative thinking, computing, and if developed, sympathy, empathy, compassion, and love," writes Pearce.

Creative play, conversation with adults and story-telling are Nature's choice for developing a child's neocortex. But with parent's spending an average of 10 minutes a day talking to their children, and television monopolizing almost seven hours a day in the average home, the human interaction needed by children for higher brain development is practically non-existent.

Failing to develop the higher brain, the imagination, "means children who can't 'see' what the mathematical symbol or the semantic words mean; nor the chemical formulae; nor the concept of civilization·A child who can't imagine not only can't learn but has no hope in general: He or she can't 'imagine' an inner scenario to replace the outer one, so feels victimized by the environment·True playing is the ability to play with one's reality."

Consider the above description of television's effect on a child's developing brain, and then recall that the average preschooler watches 54 hours a week. The mountain of damage is staggering.

And that is not the worst of it. At age 11, in a natural house-cleaning process, all undeveloped neurons in the neocortex, up to 80 per cent, are dumped. Lost forever. "Only those neural patterns stimulated and sufficiently developed are left·Use it or lose it is nature's dictate," writes Pearce.

Pearce believes that television is second only to hospital birth in contributing to the "current collapse of childhood." He notes that before television there were no recorded child suicides, whereas today a child attempts to take his or her life every 78 seconds. He warns that as "our damaged children grow-up and become parents and teachers, damage will be the norm, the way of life."

Is the damaged way already the normal way of life? What is prohibiting parents from taking action now to control television in their homes?

Marie Winn, author of The Plug-In Drug, believes that damaged and addicted parents and teachers are the reasons that media literacy limits are almost impossible to follow. Winn compares the experience of watching television to chemical dependency. She notes that television withdrawal symptoms parallel drug withdrawal symptoms, and the need to repeatedly watch, coupled with a lack of concern over what is being watched, is similar to a chemically dependent person's cravings and lack of discretion over what form their drug takes.

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