Letters to the Editor
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The Televisual Attention Defecit Connection
Television's role in attention deficits could not be more clear. You have to remember, the psychic wiring of a two-year old child is laying itself out for the first time. And before the early-eighties advent of cable television and vcr's it was next to impossible to bombard your child with hypnotic televisual imagery. Television is not merely interesting to a child, it's entertaining. The hypnotic allure of entertainment must never be underestimated. A child could just as easily be mesmerized/entertained by a man juggling balls but the lack of variety in this image would eventually cause the child to look elsewhere. Television provides an entertaining, non-stop variety of image that has only been available for about twenty yrs . . . Hmmm . . . isn't that about when all this ADHD, Ritalin-treated stuff started. When a child's brain is entertained at a maddening clip, guess what happens? Well, when it's time to disengage from all this televisual stimuli the child discovers that everything else in life is not nearly as entertaining -- homework, listening to parental directions, books. The child's mind becomes unengageable, settling into a sort of default setting. And this is not good, not at all.
Penway.
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Wow! I feel like Supermom!
And it took so little — just a few letters from people who couldn't manage to raise their children without television. ;) C'mon, people — it's a little more work, but it's hardly impossible. Mainly, it requires making conscious decisions — a skill I believe television undermines.
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I was watching Dora the Explorer and Diego
I was trapped at the car dealer and they left Dora and Diego on in the waiting room. It made me want to burn down the building and shoot everyone fleeing the disaster. While naked. And laughing hysterically.
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TV amd just staring at a screen
TV is not "bad" in an of itself. Neither are computer games.
Biggest problems of little kids watching TV or using video games excessively are:
1: It induces a passivity in kids that down the road inhibits active learning behavior.
2. It displaces other activities like reading or manipulating objects, learning music or math or reading or just playing with other kids. These activities are extremely important in a child's intellectual and social development. TV and video games are just too passive an activity.
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oh YAWN
How many times must we read this article? Didn't you just publish a "TV is evil" column not three months ago? And three months previously? And last year? And...and...and.....YAWN.
I have three children. All three watch TV occasionally, just as I let them eat sweets and stay up late occasionally. Shockingly, they are all still alive and thriving.
Move on. Haven't we got more important things to cover, like, say, the war in Iraq? I worry more that this damn war will still be going on when my boys are draft age than I do that an occasional episode of Blue's Clues or a commercial for McDonald's will hurt them.
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So very very very tired of "blame the parent" for ADHD
OK. So every other article you pick up, in any magazine, newspaper, or blog, has yet another opinion on ADHD. It's caused by TV. It's caused by lazy parents. It's caused by food additives. It's caused by modern society. It's caused because we don't understand boys. Blah blah blah.
I dare you, all of you ADHD naysayers. YOU come to my house and YOU take my ADHD son off his meds, and YOU go parent him to your heart's delight. We don't eat food with tons of additives. He goes to public school, and we're doing our damndest to get him the help he needs, both with the public school resource room teacher and with private tutors. He didn't go to day care as an infant, he stayed home with a parent (while we scraped on one income), and he watched a little bit of TV. Less than an hour a day.
Have fun peeling him off the ceiling. Have fun getting the call from the school three times a day about what he's done next. I kid you not, we had a call in first grade (on a day when we forgot his meds)... "He's not just jumping in the puddles, he's DRINKING out of them."
This is a kid with an IQ of 140 (and yes, he's had every diagnostic test money can buy, through public school and private clinics), with a wheelbarrow load of learning disabilities, who climbs the walls without meds.
With meds, he can build amazing structures out of legos, tell me the plot of every Harry Potter novel, he knows how the Mars Rover works, and which caterpillar crawls the fastest (from the Guiness Book of World Records). Without meds, his behavior (not intelligence, behavior) regresses about three years. Which means he's a first grader in a fourth grade body, with fourth grade expectations.
I am so incredibly tired of being blamed for my son's condition. I didn't cause it any more than anyone with a family history of diabetes or poor eyesight "caused" their child's disability. We do our best to get him everything he needs, and yes, that includes medication and careful monitoring from a specialist. We didn't do this lightly, we did it carefully and after much trial and error of almost everything else.
With meds, he can participate in life--play soccer, go to day camp, go to school, have dinner at Grandma's, have friends, ride his bike in the street. Without meds, I can't let him out of my sight for a single second or all hell is breaking loose. And yet everyone with a keyboard feels authorized to tell me and other parents of ADHD children that we're doing it all wrong. Fine then. You come to my house and do it right. I'll have sit back with a large glass of iced tea and I'll watch.
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To anonymous
About the part where you say he watched tv for less than an hour a day. You lie.
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Shame on grisscoat
grisscoat wrote:
"About the part where you say he watched tv for less than an hour a day. You lie."
Wow, what an incredibly unfair, unkind and cruel thing to say!
ADHD has been around before TV was even invented. I do believe that TV has something to do with the enormous increase in the number of kids diagnosed with ADD and ADHD, BUT not every toddler who watches a lot of TV ends up with ADD/ADHD and not every kid with ADD/ADHD watched a lot of TV while a toddler.
There definitely is a genetic component to ADD/ADHD. It could be that some kids are just more sensitive to the effects of TV, or that TV has nothing to do with the huge increase in Ritalin prescriptions. But since there are these correlational studies (and also a mechanism to explain these correlations), parents should, to be on the safe side, follow the APA recommendation of no TV before 2.