Letters to the Editor
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Argh--Who does understand cause and effect?
Allen, whoever writes that
"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."
clearly does not understand cause and effect relationships (unless the study actually randomized children to TV-watching and non-TV-watching groups and controlled for all sorts of potentially relevant variables like SES, parenting, etc etc etc).
Also, operant conditioning is VERY different from "UNDERSTANDING cause and effect". A person (baby, dog, pigeon...) can alter their behavior in response to reinforcement in an operant conditioning paradigm without understanding cause and effect relationships, even without awareness of the reinforcement or conditioning itself.
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Moderation is not always the best policy...
As for "rage and sanctimony", I am a tutor and encounter kids on a daily basis. I see kids with good vocabularies, good language skills, an interest in reading, good writing skills; and then, I see kids with poor vocabularies who produce ungrammatical gibberish when they try to write (even though they are native English speakers). I would much rather see more of the former and fewer of the latter. Purely from a selfish reason, mind you; an illiterate nurse who botches a medication due to poor reading skills, an illiterate teacher who cannot teach well, an illiterate government agent who cannot find the right document, and so on, all affect me directly.
If TV watching in babies - the article was about babies, not older kids - is shown to reduce vocabulary and inhibit language learning (and there is at least a correlation), there is no such thing as moderation. Just as you wouldn't let your baby smoke "moderately", drink alcohol "in moderation", or inhale "moderate" amounts of lead dust, you shouldn't let your baby watch TV.
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But it ISN'T part of life
al74 wrote <<They're just neutral, part of life. TV watching is one of those things.>>
But TV watching isn't just "part of life," or neutral, by a long shot. Everything on TV serves the interests of someone paying lots of money for it to do so. TV watching disconnects us from what is real and immediate and vibrant in our own world. Even if what your child's doing instead of watching TV doesn't have an explicit educational agenda, it is educational--he's learning intimately and tangibly how best to live in and control his own world.
Of course I enjoy the occasional compelling and well-written TV show...though I'm having to wait for season 3 of LOST to come out on DVD to watch on my computer as I haven't owned a TV in 5 years. But for an infant or toddler--when there's no good known to come of it, and a whole lot of real life we do know they're missing out on...as another poster wrote, why would you just passively give huge profit-motivated corporations such access to your child?
Sure, TV watching may not do *much* harm to young kids, but we also know that doing almost anything else is better for them.
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TV and autism
<<Allen, whoever writes that
"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."
clearly does not understand cause and effect relationships...>>
That was Greg Easterbrook at Slate.com, and the two articles he wrote on the topic were some of the most irresponsible, poorly researched poppycock I have ever had the misfortune to read. It was clear he doesn't even have a basic understanding of some common major features of autism. The study itself that made that statistical connection was never published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, but on the website of the Cornell University Johnson Graduate School of Management. Easterbrook uncritically accepts that there even *is* an autism epidemic when he quotes the correlation of diagnosis rates to prevalance of TV ownership in the areas under study.
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30 minutes?
Is it realistic to think you can sit a kid down for just 30 minutes and then shut the tv off? I bet that any kid over the age of 2 will give an argument about that.
I think another fallacy in this article is about kids who grew up on tv in the past few decades ... I believe that tv these days is considered more harmful for kids due to the large amount of flashing images -- you know how tv is more jazzed up now than when Milton Burle was on...
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If anyone's still reading ...
A few counterarguments:
Yes, all TV serves the purposes of advertisers and is a marketing opportunity, but what isn't? If I wanted to deny all those corporations access to my child, I'd have to remove all the toys from our house, and all the packaged food products while I'm at it. And all the store-bought clothing, for that matter. And I don't know what the hell I'd do when we left the house.
Yes, there are things that are better for my child than watching TV, but these things can't be done constantly. How much time do you think you can spend reading books with a kid? One of the things I've learned as a parent is that there's ALWAYS something better you can do with them. You read a book, but there's surely a more valuable book than the one you're reading. You play with them, but there's always a more constructive and eductional way to play. You simply can't do the the best possible thing for your child all the time; it's impossible. I think of all the time kids spend riding around in a damn car, or simply waiting for parents to make their food or get their stuff ready to go--there are definitely better things the kids could be doing at these times, but that's okay.
This evening, my 2-year-old and I spent time cooking and eating together, playing with her dollhouse, learning letters and numbers, reading books, and watching a Sesame Street video together--and, by the way, don't even try to tell me that Sesame Street can't be eductional. Maybe that half-hour in front of the TV could have been spent doing something better, but so what? She's no worse off.
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Alpha Brainwaves
From the article:
“You debunk a lot of the popular beliefs about the bad things TV does to kids, for instance, the idea that when kids watch TV they turn into zoned-out "zombies," or catch attention deficit hyperactivity disorder [ADHD]. What's the evidence that's not true?”
“Those were two things that I worried about a lot as a mom. There are no studies that show television causing attention problems. All we have is a link, an association. The more that I talked to experts on ADHD, I found a lot of reason to think that children who have attention problems are either more attracted to television, or their parents use the television more in their households.”
Actually the idea that TV turns adults into "zoned-out zombies" does have scientific
validity. In the February 2002 issue of Scientific American, in an article called "Television Addiction Is No Mere Metaphor" (click on my name for the link) the authors discuss TV's effect on brainwaves.
It turns out that adults produce a preponderance of Alpha brainwaves while watching TV. Alpha brainwaves are associated with meditation or daydreaming. Beta brainwaves are associated with normal waking active focus. And Gamma brainwaves are associated with highly focused thinking, such as while playing a musical instrument or trying to solve a difficult problem.
Now it could be that while the brains of adults slow down while watching TV, that TV actually has a different effect on very young children. I don't know, although I did read about a skin resistance study that was done on babies watching TV showing that they were in the same passive relaxed state as adult TV watchers.
I realize that the studies showing a correlation between young children watching a lot of TV and attention problems do not prove that TV causes these problems. But ADD is also associated with slow brainwaves. A coincidence? Perhaps not.