Television Interferes with Children's Learning

I occasionally baby-sit my neighbor's child, who is in the first grade. The first thing I noticed was that she watched television excessively. If I were to watch her for five hours, she would spend the whole five hours watching television. One time, I decided to tell her parents that I was concerned with the degree of television that she watches. They said that the only reason that they allow her to watch that much television is because they have heard that television may help her succeed academically. I was shocked that they actually believe that watching endless hours of cartoon network would help her in academics. I thought they were purely for entertainment. Nowadays, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, television has become so popular that a typical American child spends an average of 6 hours 32 minutes per day watching television. American children spend more time watching television than doing any other activity except sleeping. Therefore, it is no surprise television viewing of the children has immense and detrimental effect on the children especially on the fields of education, violence, and substance use.

The first concern for Americans is with the effects of television on children's learning. This preoccupation is especially strong for the children of age from three to five whose brains are in critical stage of development and television viewing can affect the way that their neural brainwork develops. According to Comstock's research, if children watch television heavily, which would be watching more than five hours of television daily, the child could have significantly lower verbal interaction time because that child would be replacing the time that he or she would otherwise spend on interacting with others to learn new words by watching television. Also, they will lose interest in normal class setting such as reading and writing the most, since the television is highly stimulating and normal classroom activities will bore them much faster than average children. The reason is that television is highly stimulating, and when it over stimulates children at an early age, it will be the primary cause of short attention span, and since television often emphasizes non-academic skills and cause the children to loss interest in academics.

The biggest impact of television viewing for children is on their reading skills (Comstock). The reason is that for the children to excel in reading, they have to start and maintain the interest in reading at an early age, and when children watch obtrusive amount of television, five or more hours per day, the time they spend on reading is significantly reduced or almost completely replaced. Since the child can only gain reading fluency through practice, the child will not be able to obtain that interest in reading, let alone keep the interest high in their lifetime because TV watching will displace the reading time. However, Comstock claims that is the only reason for the big impact of television, this problem can be easily be fixed if children watch less television and spend more time doing academic works.
The committee of public education claims that "in the scientific literature on media violence, the connection of media violence to real-life aggressive behavior and violence has been substantiated. As much as 10% to 20% of real-life violence may be attributable to media violence." National Television Violence Study's research found that "nearly two thirds of all programming contains violence, children's shows contain the most violence, portrayals of violence are usually glamorized, and perpetrators often go unpunished." Also, according to their survey with children in kindergarten through sixth grade, 37% reported that they had been frightened or upset by a television story in the preceding year. So, watching the amount of television that the children today watch can not only build the image of unreal violent life that is often romanticized, it will frighten more than a third of them.

Every time I turn on the television, I can often find a program that at least talks about substance use in less than five minutes. It is no surprise that the children are affected by the amount of media coverage on drugs. According to DuRant's research, one fourth of all MTV videos contain alcohol or tobacco use, and there is a positive correlation between television and music video viewing and alcohol consumption among teens. Children are often not allowed to watch the channels like MTV and often do not watch them, but I know that when my neighbor's child peruses through the channels, she sometimes stops at MTV channel to listen to her favorite song. I did not pay attention to any drug use, but it is readily available for them with a flip of a channel. There is no question that any child that watches the television that much will be able to come in contact with drug use or substance abuse covered by the media.

Despite all the studies against television, my neighbor was not completely wrong when it came to television being helpful. Studies have shown that "children who watch carefully constructed educational programs aimed at their age level," such as Sesame Street, read better than children who watch those programs infrequently or not at all (MacBeth, 1996, Wright, et al., 2001). The main reason is that those educational programs emphasize the academic skills that children need for better learning skills. However, educational programs cannot just help the children the way we want them to by just turning it on for the children to watch freely. If that happens, they will be exposed to violence, substance use, and even sexual behaviors at a young age. Luckily, this problem can be easily fixed by using media ratings. However, 68% of the parents of 10- to 17-year-olds do not use the television rating system at all, and only 10% check the ratings of computer or video games that their adolescents wish to rent or buy (The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation).The reason was that many parents find the ratings unreliably low, with an objective parental evaluation finding as much as 50% of television shows rated TV-14 to be inappropriate for their teenagers (Grossman). Even though the ratings might be unreliable, the parents can easily control what their children watch by simply reading or using such programs as the parental tv guide or v-chip, and there is no reason not to do so.

The study by Office of Educational Research and Improvement has shown that students spend four times more time watching television than doing homework. In the world where the biggest concern of a parent is getting the best education for their children, this is not acceptable. Apparently, as with my neighbor, it is often considered too cumbersome to check the programs that the children watch. The best option that the television gives us is to make sure that the children get all the benefits of the television. We should all take advantage of all the good that can come from a television by limit the time children spend watching television to no more than one to two hours a day, as recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics, and use the parental guidelines to restrict the inappropriate programs for the children.

Works Cited
American Academy of Pediatrics, .
Committee on Public Education, "AMERICAN ACADEMY OF PEDIATRICS: Media Violence." PEDIATRICS 5 November 2001: 1222-1226.
Comstock, George, and Haejun Paik. Television and the American Child. San Diego. Academic Press, Inc., 1991
DuRant RH, Rome ES, Rich M, Allred E, Emans SJ, Woods ER Tobacco and alcohol use behaviors portrayed in music videos: a content analysis. Am J Public Health. 1997; 87:1131-1135
Grossman D, DeGaetano G. Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill: A Call to Action Against TV, Movie & Video Game Violence. New York, NY: Crown Publishers; 1999
MacBeth, Tannis. Tuning Into Young Viewers. Newbury Park, CA: SAGE Publications, (1996).
National Television Violence Study, "National Television Violence Study Year Three: 1996-97 - Report." Sage Publications .
Office of Educational Research and Improvement (1998). National education longitudinal study of 1988. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.
Reinking, D. and Wu, J. Reexamining the research on television and reading.
Robinson TN, Chen HL, Killen JD. Television and music video exposure and risk of adolescent alcohol use. Pediatrics [serial online]. 1998;102:e54. Available at: http://www.pediatrics.org/cgi/content/full/102/5/e54. Accessed May 2, 2000.
The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Parents, Children, and the Television Ratings System. Menlo Park, CA: The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation; 1998
Tseng, Eliana Shiao . "Content Analysis of Children's Television Advertising Today." The University of Texas at Austin