Is TV Ruining Our Children?

By Richard Zoglin

Behold every parent's worst nightmare: the six-year-old TV addict. He watches in the morning before he goes off to school, plops himself in front of the set as soon as he gets home in the afternoon and gets another dose to calm down before he goes to bed at night. He wears Bart Simpson T shirts, nags Mom to buy him Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles toys and spends hours glued to his Nintendo. His teacher says he is restless and combative in class. What's more, he's having trouble reading.

Does this creature really exist, or is he just a paranoid video-age vision? The question is gaining urgency as the medium barges ever more aggressively into children's lives. Except for school and the family, no institution plays a bigger role in shaping American children. And no institution takes more heat. TV has been blamed for just about everything from a decrease in attention span to an increase in street crime. Cartoons are attacked for their violence and sitcoms for their foul language. Critics ranging from religious conservatives to consumer groups like Action for Children's Television have kept up a steady drumbeat of calls for reform.

Last week Congress took a small step toward obliging. Legislators sent to President Bush a bill that would set limits on commercial time in children's programming (a still generous 10 1/2 minutes per hour on weekends and 12 minutes on weekdays). The bill would also require stations to air at least some educational kids' fare as a condition for getting their licenses renewed. Bush has argued that the bill infringes on broadcasters' First Amendment rights, but (unlike President Reagan, who vetoed a similar measure two years ago) he is expected to allow it to become law.

$ Yet these mild efforts at reform, as well as critics' persistent gripes about the poor quality of children's TV, skirt the central issue. Even if the commercialism on kidvid were reined in, even if local stations were persuaded to air more "quality" children's fare, even if kids could be shielded from the most objectionable material, the fact remains that children watch a ton of TV. Almost daily, parents must grapple with a fundamental, overriding question: What is all that TV viewing doing to kids, and what can be done about it?

Television has, of course, been an inseparable companion for most American youngsters since the early 1950s. But the baby boomers, who grew up with Howdy Doody and Huckleberry Hound, experienced nothing like the barrage of video images that pepper kids today. Cable has vastly expanded the supply of programming. The VCR has turned favorite shows and movies into an endlessly repeatable pastime. Video games have added to the home box's allure.

The average child will have watched 5,000 hours of TV by the time he enters first grade and 19,000 hours by the end of high school -- more time than he will spend in class. This dismayingly passive experience crowds out other, more active endeavors: playing outdoors, being with friends, reading. Marie Winn, author of the 1977 book The Plug-In Drug, gave a memorable, if rather alarmist, description of the trancelike state TV induces: "The child's facial expression is transformed. The jaw is relaxed and hangs open slightly; the tongue rests on the front teeth (if there are any). The eyes have a glazed, vacuous look . . ."

Guided by TV, today's kids are exposed to more information about the world around them than any other generation in history. But are they smarter for it? Many teachers and psychologists argue that TV is largely to blame for the decline in reading skills and school performance. In his studies of children at Yale, psychologist Jerome Singer found that kids who are heavy TV watchers tend to be less well informed, more restless and poorer students. The frenetic pace of TV, moreover, has seeped into the classroom. "A teacher who is going into a lengthy explanation of an arithmetic problem will begin to lose the audience after a while," says Singer. "Children are expecting some kind of show." Even the much beloved Sesame Street has been criticized for reinforcing the TV-inspired notion that education must be fast paced and entertaining. Says Neil Postman, communications professor at New York ) University and author of Amusing Ourselves to Death: "Sesame Street makes kids like school only if school is like Sesame Street."

Televised violence may also be having an effect on youngsters. Singer's research has shown that prolonged viewing by children of violent programs is associated with more aggressive behavior, such as getting into fights and disrupting the play of others. (A link between TV and violent crime, however, has not been clearly established.) Other studies suggest that TV viewing can dampen kids' imagination. Patricia Marks Greenfield, a professor of psychology at UCLA, conducted experiments in which several groups of children were asked to tell a story about the Smurfs. Those who were shown a Smurfs TV cartoon beforehand were less "creative" in their storytelling than kids who first played an unrelated connect-the-dots game.

But the evidence is flimsy for many popular complaints about TV. In a 1988 report co-authored for the U.S. Department of Education, Daniel Anderson, professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, found no convincing evidence that TV has a "mesmerizing effect" on children, overstimulates them or reduces their attention span. In fact, the report asserted, TV may actually increase attention-focusing capabilities.

Nor, contrary to many parents' fears, have the new video technologies made matters worse. Small children who repeatedly watch their favorite cassettes are, psychologists point out, behaving no differently from toddlers who want their favorite story read to them over and over. (The VCR may actually give parents more control over their kids' viewing.) Video games may distress adults with their addictive potential, but researchers have found no exceptional harm in them -- and even some possible benefits, like improving hand-eye coordination.

Yet TV may be effecting a more profound, if less widely recognized, change in the whole concept of growing up. Before the advent of television, when print was the predominant form of mass communication, parents and teachers were able to control just what and when children learned about the world outside. With TV, kids are plunged into that world almost instantly.

In his 1985 book, No Sense of Place, Joshua Meyrowitz, professor of communication at the University of New Hampshire, points out that TV reveals to children the "backstage" activity of adults. Even a seemingly innocuous program like Father Knows Best showed that parents aren't all-knowing authority figures: they agonize over problems in private and sometimes even conspire to fool children. "Television exposes kids to behavior that adults spent centuries trying to hide from children," says Meyrowitz. "The average child watching television sees adults hitting each other, killing each other, breaking down and crying. It teaches kids that adults don't always know what they're doing." N.Y.U.'s Postman believes TV, by revealing the "secrets" of adulthood, has virtually destroyed the notion of childhood as a discrete period of innocence. "What I see happening is a blurring of childhood and adulthood," he says. "We have more adultlike children and more childlike adults."

What all this implies is that TV's impact is pervasive and to a large extent inevitable. That impact cannot be wished away; all that can be done is to try to understand and control it. Reforms of the sort Congress has enacted are a salutary step. Networks and stations too -- though they are in the business of entertainment, not education -- must be vigilant about the content and commercialization of kids' shows.

The ultimate responsibility still rests with parents. The goal should not be -- cannot be -- to screen out every bad word or karate chop from kids' viewing, but rather to make sure TV doesn't crowd out all the other activities that are part of growing up. These counterbalancing influences -- family, friends, school, books -- can put TV, if not out of the picture, at least in the proper focus.

With reporting by William Tynan/New York