Children Watch Too Much Television

Parents and educationalists are given to moaning about children and television: it stops them reading; there’s too much sex and violence.

Parents are particularly anxious because they feel they are losing control over their children’s viewing. One of the biggest struggles in the home is children trying to wrest control of what and how they view away from their parents. Two thirds of British children now have a TV in their bedroom, which is double the number of European children.

Although television has advantages as an educational medium, international comparisons have shown that children who spend five or six hours a day watching television do not do as well educationally as those who only watch it for an hour or two. Television provides imaginary and artificial experiences which take the place of children’s direct experience of the natural world, and even the social world of their own households. This is a loss we scarcely acknowledge, yet it frames many of the current concerns about children’s TV.

On the other hand, television is not harmful in itself. The question we should ask is perhaps not “How much television is too much?” but “What sort of programmes are we talking about?” The visual impact of television can be enormously helpful in encouraging children to take an interest in the outside world. Subjects like geography and history are much more real if we can see pictures of mountains, castles and famous people, and it is easier to show children how scientific processes work on a TV screen than by means of an explanation in a book. While some teachers argue that children should always learn to find out things for themselves, others recognize that television has a useful part to play in education.

To a certain extent, parents are responsible if children watch too much television; after all, they can turn the programmes off if they think they are harmful. All the same, the real responsibility lies with the television companies. In spite of the obvious potential of television as an educational medium, this potential is wasted because it is misused. Children probably watch too much television, but this is not the main problem; the main problem is that they watch too many mindless programmes because there is nothing for them to see.

Children should have programmes of quality which are made specifically for them, reflecting their particular needs, concerns, interests and culture, and which do not exploit them.

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