Television's Negative Effects on Young Minds

Our present society consists of children who are constantly being entertained by images played across screens. Once a child reaches the end of his or her senior year of highschool, on average he or she has spent 11,000 hours in school and 15,000 hours in front of the screen (Costa 55). T. Berry Brazelton and Stanley I. Greenspan state in their book The Irreducible Needs of Children that “there’s a need to protect children from the overuse of TV. … When people worry about TV, the focus is on content, which is a problem, but the greater insult is the passivity” (128). Melissa Ruth, a developmental psychology professor at McMaster University, explains that “it’s not about what’s happening when a kid is watching television—it’s about what’s not happening” (qtd. in Muhtadie A1). States Jane E. Brody, “Watching television fosters development of brain circuits, or ‘habits of mind’, that result in…aggressiveness, lower tolerance levels and decreased attention spans, in lieu of developing language circuits in the brain’s left hemisphere” (F7). The brain is not making the connections it needs to while watching television, and as a result, children who watch an excessive amount of television can have lower grades, less of an imagination and can even run the risk of becoming unhealthily overweight. Parents need to monitor and regulate their children’s television watching habits so as to enforce and encourage cognitive abilities, motor skills, and learning motivation in these growing beings.

To state the obvious, thinking is critical for everyone. Furthermore, how an adult thinks generally relies on how he learned to think as a child. What type of schooling did he have? It makes a large difference in what a child is interested in, as well as how he behaves and thinks, depending on whether the child attended public school, private school, a Montessori school or if he was home schooled, among other options. The same statement goes for how a child chooses spend his free time, or how his free time activities are chosen for him. While an activity like reading promotes literacy, critical thinking, and imagination, watching television promotes nothing. A child does not think while watching TV. Instead, he absorbs.

To summarize Mary G. Burke, television is a passive experience, and while children’s eyes are fixated on the screen, countless things are not achieved cognitively. Children are not solving everyday problems because they are not interacting with any causes of the problems, such as other children whom they must get along with, sticky situations that they must get out of, or instances that call for the child to be calm and confident. Burke also touches on the idea that children are barely engaging in enough conversation with their parents, and what conversation there is is rarely deep or significant (50).

“Good learning and good problem-solving require active involvement and persistence,” explains Jane M. Healy. “Many people intuitively feel that exposure in early childhood to a great deal of television may create passive learners” (201). In this case, children will expect information to be presented to them but will not be very familiar with other learning essentials such as critical thinking and active problem-solving. “Children with less developed cognitive skills may prefer passive, nondemanding forms of entertainment to active, demanding ones. Television presents vivid, moving images; books and newspapers demand reader-generated imagery and are sketchier in terms of visual detail.” The more television that is watched by children, the more addicted they get to the passive state their brain assumes. Also, the children will be less likely to want to read, do puzzles, or put much effort into homework, as those sorts of activities require the brain to be actively applied (Krosnick, Anand and Hartl 89).

Obesity is presently at an all-time high and steadily rising. One of the main reasons for this most likely is television watching in excess. According to Jane E. Brody: “A child glued to the tube is sitting still, using the fewest calories of any activity except sleeping. Such children get less exercise than those who watch less television, and they see many more commercials for unhealthful foods and beverages. They also have more opportunity to consume such foods than do children who are out playing” (F7).
Unregulated television time means more time that the child spends sitting and eating and less time engaging in physical play, so the he runs the risk of becoming overweight. Also, while watching television with commercial breaks, children are seeing advertising for unhealthy food, which they then beg their parents for. The parents purchase the food, and children consume it while watching still more television. This is a serious health issue. Most parents say they want to help their children overcome or avoid this problem, but few do anything about it.

While in front of the television, children spend their time watching others perform physical tasks while they themselves learn nothing except how to sit and stare. Television is not an environment, it is not even an environment stimulus, so children cannot be expected to be able to explore and learn.

According to Mary G. Burke, “Children watching TV aren’t using their hands in three dimensions,” and they need to learn how to do many different physical, hands-on activities ranging from “clapping games to building, banging, weighing, molding, digging, stirring and simply touching, with a variety of materials.” She goes on to say that “these activities are necessary to sensory-motor integration. … TV and computer screens restrict development to a flat, two-dimensional surface” (50). If children, to address the extreme, do not know how to move, then they simply sit there. We can expect nothing but for them to join the obesity epidemic.

Excessive television watching decreases curiosity and learning motivation. Paraphrasing Mary G. Burke, children lose sense of their own imagination and creativity because of so much TV exposure, and resort to acting out scenes or potential scenes from their favorite shows rather than creating their own characters and situations (50). S. Eckstein states, “New electronic toys encourage children to get back to their screens by moving or ‘talking’ in response to what’s happening on their tied-in TV shows or DVDs” (qtd. in Alliance 22). Imagination has become foreign to children, and they above everyone else desperately need it, as imagination assists in their thinking and problem-solving skills that carry on all through life.

Parents need to moderate television watching. It is important to do so because children have very little self-control. It is a high recommendation that televisions are not placed in children’s bedrooms, to say the least. Additionally, Jane E. Brody says: “Half of American households have three or more [televisions]. In addition to the family or living room, there are often televisions in each bedroom, the kitchen, the basement and even the bathroom and garage. With access to television wherever children may be, it is hard for parents to control the amount and content to what they watch” (F7).
However, there is still hope. Parents have the power to set rules in regard to television watching. They have the power to put time limits on day-to-day viewing, lay boundaries on what and when their children watch, and even eliminate extra unnecessary televisions. T. Berry Brazelton and Stanley I. Greenspan announce that “an hour [of television] a day is realistic. But if we’re talking about an ideal amount, I would try to reduce TV to half an hour a day during the school week and an hour a day or maybe two hours on the weekends” (129). Television, in curbed amounts, can actually be quite harmless. Very few people in this world are willing to completely give up the television(s) in their homes. Nonetheless, while totally going cold-turkey is understandably unreasonable for most, cutting down on the time that children—or whole families—spend watching television is not.

What television does to the bodies and minds of children is a serious issue that is commonly addressed but also commonly ignored. It is very important to see that childhood is a time when children are growing, both cognitively and physically. Television seems to put this growth on hold, and in excess can even stunt it. It appears that television also rids children of the imagination, creativity and curiosity that are such a marvel of childhood. If children cannot control themselves in their watching, then their parents need to step up to this task. The effort will be for the good of not only the children, but the whole family as well. “Our time isn’t organized around TV schedules,” says John Bank on his family’s decision to toss the TV ten years ago. “We spent more time talking, exercising, playing games, and doing hobbies, and there’s no more frantic rush to finish homework ‘before my show is on’” (5). Children’s corporeal state, problem-solving skills, school performance and imagination will all benefit greatly from a reduction of television time. They may whine and complain about the new rules at first, should parents decide to set them but, in the long run, will be grateful and more happily balanced.