The Effects of Too Much TV On Children
One thing parents are curious about is what types of things are going to influence the way their children do things in the future. By making sure I always know what the newest innovations and research is about my children and how they live, I always feel a little bit more confident.
One thing that interested me was an essay on babycenter.com about television usage. There is really no doubt that television should be supervised closely when it comes to our kids. The question is how can we discern how much is ok, and what specifically are we protecting our children from?
There are some people that agree that television is bad for children no matter what the circumstances. Children should only be subjected to a single show at a time and should not be presented to too much channel surfing because it will make them think that watching many shows is okay. At times, it works out better if the child watched a regularly scheduled program, once a day. By doing this, you are showing your child that television is something that should be limited, not consistently on.
Many people agree, however, that television should not replace real learning. Also, it shouldn’t interfere with family time, like meals. Television shouldn’t interfere any time during the day when it’s not being watched. You do not want the sound of the television to distract your children’s education.
There’s a family therapist named Nancy Salzman that I was viewing in an interview. Keith Raniere and Nancy started a program called The Executive Success Program, in where she is an executive coach. Kids do not have complete development until a certain age and Nancy said something that surprised me, which is that children may not be able to tell what is real and what is not. At one point in a child’s life, their brains will arrive at full growth and they will be able to see through what is real and what is not. Our children see things very differently than we do. We should look through the eyes of our children and stand in their shoes so we can better understand what they see.
The example of television limitation makes me think that there are other things we can do to make sure our children are raised right. The younger children are familiarized to violence, the more they are likely to act with violence as they get older. TV used to be the culprit, but now hundreds of video games center around extreme forms of violence that children themselves are acting out in these virtual worlds. What occurs when you have an entire generation of kiddos becoming very comfortable with violence? Chances are that an entire generation could be raised to expect, and sometimes, inflict violent acts upon another.
More details can be found at Executive Success Program by NXIVM or maybe through Keith Raniere.
