Letters to the Editor
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3-d vision, and operant conditioning
I expected to see some mention in this interview of the fact that children under the age of 3 are still developing 3-d vision, and giving them too much 2-d time might interfere with that.
There was a fascinating study done at Cornell based on the fact that TV entered the 50 states at slightly different times. Google for "slate easterbrook autism" for a summary of the results, which include "roughly 17 percent of the growth in autism in California and Pennsylvania during the 1970s and 1980s was due to the growth in cable television."
The book "What's Going on in There?" describes a number of experiments done on even 1- and 2-day-old children demonstrating understanding of cause and effect, where they are given a pacifier hooked up to a clever tape player: quick sucking plays one recording, slow another. The infants preferentially suck to hear recordings of their mother (who they've been listening to prenatally) rather than of strange women, and even to hear recordings of strange women speaking their mother's language as opposed to some other language! While this "operant conditioning" has nothing to do with TV, I mention it because it's rather counter to the final paragraphs in the interview, and simply amazing besides.
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How about sociopathic corporations accessing your children?
I don’t let strangers play with my children, so why would I let sociopathic corporations have at them?
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How about
Being trapped in the house with an under/over medicated crazy anal retentive massively micromanaging nervous twitch of a soccermom liberal who lays awake at night sweating all the imaginary things that will kill or stupefy her little darlings and take away their shot at getting the Nobel Peace Prize at age 23?
Yes TV is evil. Everything is evil. Everything is poisonous. Everything is a plot by The Man to fuck your shit up. I know because I'm part of the conspiracy. Actually I'm from the future so I know how this turns out.
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It does seem that TV makes the kids miss out...
So let's see - very young kids don't learn as well from a video screen as from in-person interactions, can't figure out what sequence a show is supposed to be in (i.e. aren't making much sense of what's happening on the screen), don't get to develop their language skills (and in fact, kids who watch a lot of TV have reduced vocabularies compared to their TV-less peers)... and this is OK for kids - why? Sure, a few minutes every so often probably won't kill the kid, but still - why, when there are so many other distractions available? Wouldn't the kid be better off interacting with, say, a babysitter, a grandparent, a neighbor - any human being - than a television screen? Or why not give the kid some blank paper and some crayons?
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Lame
The pretexts for "why we can't remove a TV from our homes" are so unquestioned--and by smart experts. Using TV to get "news and weather"? Radios have news and weather.
Dunno if anyone here has read Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television?
I'd say one argument is having young children. You could cope without it. You really could.
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I am glad the article covered Nick Kids,
I was going to disagree and use Nick as an example of stimulating child TV...
Overall a well done article/book - seems cogent- good advice, if not taken to extremes.
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The Truth about TV
Well, I am probably disqualified from commenting, because I grew up without any TV at all as a child, barely watched it as a young adult, except for some big sports events like the Olympic Games or the World Cup, lived on a remote island for 12 years where there was only one (pathetic) TV channel, and never watch TV now except in Wal*Mart, the airport lounge, or occasionally in a hotel room.
But my observation is that the more moronic people are, the more they watch TV. Is this cause or effect? Who knows, but why take the risk and expose your children to it? It will do them no harm to read books instead of watching TV, and if you want to know what the weather will be like, look outside.
You see, what most people fail to notice is that the message is the medium. TV is about advertising, selling products, promoting brands. All else is secondary. Sure, to some extent it is also a medium for political propaganda, but the real TV message is that it is your patriotic duty as a citizen to consume goods, buy foods that are bad for you, drink beer, fly to far off places with palm trees, and, above all, to take a pill for every ill.
If that is what you want your children to learn about life, then strap them in front of the TV and prop their eyes open.
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Nothing good correlates with kid TV-watching.
Nothing.
You can't name one positive thing that correlates with kids and more rather than less TV watching.
Go ahead. Try. You just can't do it.
How many studies do you need to run to know this?
Why do we have to keep hearing from mealy-mouthed equivocators on this issue?
It's not that hard to keep the TV away from kidlets of any age.
That is all.
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Try a little moderation
TV, in itself, may not provide any benefits, but so what? The other lesson to be learned here is that there's almost no evidence that it does any harm, and there are countless everyday things we all do with our kids that have no educational agenda. Sometimes watching TV can be simple fun. My 2-yr.-old loves to watch Dora and Barney, and my watching it with her is a good opportunity for us to just have fun together.
Eliminating TV altogether is a fine choice, but there's no reason to think it's a better choice than responsibly treating the TV just like any other plaything.
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What is about TV that brings out such rage and sanctimony?
I find Guernsey's approach to be refreshingly moderate -- and well-informed. She's digested the research and found that there is little to no evidence that selective TV watching among small children is harmful. But so many of the responses here take such a narrow, extreme approach -- "Nothing positive comes out of watching TV! Nothing!" -- without considering that so many things we do every day don't have a "positive" impact. They're just neutral, part of life. TV watching is one of those things. I don't claim that the hour my 2-year-old spends watching Sesame Street is making him smarter, but I know he enjoys it, and I know it allows me to take a break or get things done. He spends the other ten hours of his day reading books, playing at the park, listening to music, napping, and generally being a toddler.
People who don't like TV don't have to watch it. But I'm not sure why those people are so invested in how other families spends their time, especially when the "science" backing up their claims that it's harmful is so flimsy -- including that Cornell "study" allegedly linking TV viewing and autism that an earlier poster noted. That study was conducted by economists, was not-peer reviewed or published in a journal, and has been debunked by serious scientists. More to the point, like the ADHD studies Guernsey mentions, it showed correlation, not causation.
Come on, people, have some perspective.