Kids' Risky TV Habits

American Prospect: Call To Reshape Kids' Media Habits

(The American Prospect) 
So why the huge gulf between what the majority of parents think about the media, particularly TV, and the extent to which many of those same parents readily allow their kids to watch the stuff? It's not a hard question to answer. Every hour that a child sits transfixed in front of a television, GameBoy, movie screen, or computer makes the challenging workday of a parent or caregiver more manageable and less demanding. Without those reliably low-stress ways of occupying kids, depending on their age and demeanor, adults in charge end up having to do a lot more planning, reading, physical activities, cajoling, refereeing, cleaning, organizing, arguing, schlepping, and so on. Throw in the pressure that children apply when they are deprived of amenities and privileges that their peers enjoy and it's no wonder that most parents do little to stand in the way of the entertainment and advertising industries' access to their children. (In my own home, our 9-year-old twins and 4-year-old son know that I am much easier to manipulate into flicking on the tube -- usually to watch the Food Channel -- than my resolute wife.)

For all kinds of reasons, new and improved ratings systems wouldn't make much of a difference. Parents who try to limit or at least supervise what their children watch can already pretty easily distinguish programming that they consider to be inappropriate for their children from what they deem to be relatively harmless. But more fundamentally, just about anything a child does short of hanging out on a street corner with a gang is going to be better for his or her development than squatting for hours a day in front of the TV. The kinds of shows I watched regularly during my childhood in the 1970s -- Three Stooges shorts, The Match Game (in which the most popular response to roughly every other question was "boobs"), professional wrestling -- would undoubtedly receive the seal of approval from any new system of standards and practices. But today I really wish I could recover the brain cells that the tube vaporized during that era. The harm isn't just in the content of particular shows, or even the more insidious ads; it's in the vast quantity of time squandered on a passive, unproductive ritual over the course of a child's formative years.

A lot of research has been conducted that associates higher levels of television viewing by children with outcomes like poorer performance in school, lower literacy skills, higher rates of obesity, increased levels of aggressiveness, and so on. That research is alarming, and a lot more is needed to more fully understand how TV and other media affect kids. But so far, the abundant evidence shows pretty decisively that parents are right to be concerned about what their children are watching. Still, that knowledge hasn't made any discernable dent in the extent to which kids have ready access at home to TV, often unsupervised. Smoking causes cancer, seat belts save lives, and too much TV is bad for kids -- we know those things already, and more research will only reinforce what most people understand intellectually and viscerally. The challenge is to change deeply ingrained behavior, and orating on the stump about Hollywood without saying anything constructive about household habits won't make much of a difference.

The only strategy with a real prayer of working would be to emulate as much as possible the public-education campaigns that, over an extended period of time, helped to reduce smoking and increase seat-belt use. The task is even harder in this case: Television viewing isn't a matter of life and death, public-policy tools like cigarette taxes and mandatory seat-belt requirements aren't in the realm of possibility, and TV networks could be expected to resist advertising suggesting that it's not a good idea to help children become hooked on their product.