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TV can be a good parent
The American Academy of Pediatrics says television watching is harmful to babies and toddlers. This mama says: I don't think so.
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Imagine the child who is being read to, compared to another who's watching TV. One enjoys contact with another person; the other's chief relationship is with a machine. (Even if caregivers try to discuss TV programs with their 2-year-olds, the effort is bound to be futile: According to Bar-on, children can't even distinguish between commercials and regular programming until they're 8.) The reading interaction proceeds at the child's pace; the TV's pace is imposed and often frenetic. One child hears the beauty of the language as invested by the reader; the other hears a disembodied, often cacophonous miscellany. And one has the choice of hearing the same story, over and over again, each time imagining between the lines, conjuring up a different aspect of its world, while the other's programs are arbitrarily imposed. Books stimulate the imagination, while TV, the most literal of mediums, dries it up -- that's why we read the book before we see the movie.

Also TV can be a good parent The American Academy of Pediatrics says television watching is harmful to babies and toddlers. This mama says: I don't think so.

It's intriguing that the AAP's policy statement has become a front-page watershed in the long-running argument over the worth of TV, for ultimately we're faced with a question of values, a moral choice. Experts can try to measure the damage done by TV, but they can't answer these questions any better than we can: Do we want to allow TV-land's strangers access to our children's minds when we so resolutely protect our kids from strangers in public? Do we mean to inculcate small children with the values of consumerism, TV's overriding ethos? Or do we camp them in front of TV sets chiefly because we've given up on finding satisfaction -- for them and for us -- in the unmediated world?

In truth, for all its nearly platitudinous merit, the AAP policy statement strikes me as a political document, an earnest but calculated warning. Bar-on says drafting the statement was a two-year process involving "significant" peer review, "multiple" revisions, and approval by the academy's board of directors, and she stresses that the AAP "really doesn't want to make parents feel guilty." Perhaps it's for that reason that the statement advises them to expose children over 2 to "media education" instead of simply keeping the TV off.

But there's nothing magical about turning 2: The problems that arise when toddlers watch TV merely deepen as they grow older. The only thing wrong with the AAP statement is that it doesn't go nearly far enough.
salon.com | August 17, 1999

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