Quoted Text

In defense of the idiot box

By MARIA ANGLIN
First published: Sunday, July 27, 2008
Hey kids! Know what time it is? It's time to kick television!
Again!

It's such an easy target that we just keep hammering away.

Now, USA Today reported that even having a television on as background noise could be "an environmental hazard" to a child.

In a small study reported in the journal Child Development, experts found that children between 1 and 3 years old with a turned-on televison nearby were distracted and lost interest in their toys quicker than kids who were given the same opportunity to play without the idiot box in the background, even if the show was one little kids wouldn't understand, such as "Jeopardy!"

The distraction was small; the report said the TV-exposed kids, who looked at the screen every now and again, played with their toys about 90 seconds less than the quiet time bunch in a 30-minute period. That doesn't sound so bad, but the real problem was that the distracted kids apparently lost interest in any particular toy in about half the time the other group of kids did. That's bad, the experts say, because little kids need play to develop cognitive skills and to learn to plan ahead.

In other words, TV is bad. I'm no child development expert, but having grown up in a TV-rich household, I have to stick up for my square lifelong friend.

Granted, I had a mom who balanced the TV fun with skill-building activities such as household chores, forced interaction with irritating neighborhood kids and penmanship exercises that were popular in her day, so gorging on TV wasn't a problem -- and that's key. But I know what I'm talking about when I say that some time spent in front of the small screen can give kids an edge.

I can't remember what shows mom and dad were watching before I turned 3, but I know the TV was on. My parents spoke to me mostly in Spanish, but not so the TV. With the help of "Sesame Street," "Villa Alegre," "The Electric Company" and all manner of Hannah-Barbera characters, my vocabulary exploded by the time I was 5.

And I wasn't just walking around counting to 12 in a funky tune. Immersion really works; kids pick up meaning and usage pretty quickly. They also pick up social cues that help them fit in, stuff that they might not pick up at home. It's exposure to the kind of diversity a person gets when one goes away to college or gets that first job, on a much smaller scale. On Saturday mornings, "Schoolhouse Rock" taught me the preamble to the Constitution, the nuances of the Louisiana Purchase, multiplication tables, and the difference between nouns, verbs and adverbs and yes, conjunctions that hook up words and phrases and clauses. And a little yellow guy with skinny legs confirmed that one has to eat some kind of breakfast every day and that hankerin' for a hunk of cheese is a healthy way to snack anytime a kid is weak in the knees.

I can't say those distractions were so awful since I can still sing the song about providing for the common defense, promoting the general welfare and securing the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.
Lofty stuff for a kid? Not one armed with a dictionary, an encyclopedia and parents who routinely said, "Go look it up."
As for the squelching of creativity of which TV is accused, I also know that not only did I play, I created a parallel universe with imaginary characters sparked by the plotlines of the TV world. Did you know, for example that the family on "Land of the Lost" weren't the only ones to fall through that space/time continuum, but were joined by a girl who could telekinetically communicate with the cro-magnon people and the Sleestak? Or that TV's "Wonder Woman" had a cute little sister with stronger powers? Or that "Starsky and Hutch" were occasionally joined by a female detective that was a better crime fighter than the two of them put together?

Of course, that doesn't address the issue of attention span. I'll cop to being the kid who looked out the window during class, thinking about how cool it would be to have a robot that could answer any question in the world so you wouldn't need a dictionary or an encyclopedia. (Hey, it wasn't Al Gore that invented the Internet, it was me!) And I never had the concentration or patience required to grasp higher math.

But last week, my 9-month-old daughter, who had been sporadically raising her arm in something that kind of looked like a wave, overheard SpongeBob saying goodbye to Plankton -- and she turned around and waved. And she did it again when that DVRed scene was replayed 20 minutes later.

I don't credit TV -- her parents and both sets of grandparents have been trying to get her to wave for weeks. But SpongeBob helped, and thanks to him and Plankton, I know she gets it.

I just hope she has the wherewithal for calculus and trig, too.

Anglin writes for the San Antonio Express-News. Her e-mail address ismanglin@express-news.net.

Quoted Text

The distraction was small; the report said the TV-exposed kids, who looked at the screen every now and again, played with their toys about 90 seconds less than the quiet time bunch in a 30-minute period. That doesn't sound so bad, but the real problem was that the distracted kids apparently lost interest in any particular toy in about half the time the other group of kids did. That's bad, the experts say, because little kids need play to develop cognitive skills and to learn to plan ahead.