Television And Children

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In addition to our adult reptilian brain's vulnerability to television's hypnotic glare, we now have "a growing dependency upon television as a child-rearing tool· Despite their considerable guilt at not being able to control their children's viewing, parent's do not take steps to extricate themselves from television's domination. They can no longer cope without it."

However, Winn concedes, there were a few families in her studies that were able to control television in their homes. Some of Winn's families employed "natural" alternatives to controlling television viewing like placing the television in a poor location or using a fuzzy set that didn't invite constant viewing.

For parents who want to take on the battle of controlling media in their homes, there is Screen Smarts, A Family Guide to Media Literacy, by Gloria DeGaetano and Kathleen Bander. This book contains tools for teaching your children to "read and analyze images" but warns, "it takes time to learn media literacy." Screen Smarts recommends: discussing with your children how television programs are made, asking your children to rewrite the scripts of the programs they watch, or to count the number of violent acts in a show. Unlike America, in Great Britain and Australia media literacy has been established as an integral component of the educational system for more than a decade.

And then there is Jon Katz, a media critic who insists in his book Virtuous Reality that "Children need more, not less access to technology, culture and information." Right.

And as Pearce et al, from Congressional Committees to the AAP have agreed: television viewing damages the developing minds of children. And no amount of bickering between CBS vice-presidents and parent's watch groups over "what is educational content" or a hundred government agencies advocating the development of media literacy skills is going to reverse that biological, neurological fact.

Even if media education and AAP viewing guidelines are enthusiastically followed, even if Congress gains control of Hollywood and Hollywood gives all of its billions of advertising dollars to the "Children Damaged by Television Fund", and even if television watching diminishes from the current seven hours a day to the AAP's pipe dream of one hour a day, it will still be one hour a day, 365 hours a year, our children will neglect the urgently needed development of their higher brain cells; cells that will be lost forever at the tender age of eleven. Which unknown potential shall we choose to forfeit the development of in exchange for an hour with Elmo? Do you really want to count the number of violent scenes in a television show with your child?

Maybe our last best hope rests with the cable company. And perhaps Nature Herself will lend a hand and bring our evolution back on course by providing a meteoric catastrophe that will zap all of our cable boxes and force us to wait and wait and wait for the television-raised, damaged employees of the cable company to show-up and save us. And maybe by the time they do, we will have saved ourselves.

http://www.familiesfornaturalliving.org

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