Home Fire #6 - The Boob Tube

Home Fire

The Boob Tube

We didn’t kill our television, but we maimed it.

Basic cable, channels 2 through 13, is all Rich and I get now. Neither of us had more than basic when we met. When we moved in together we upgraded to expanded cable, which added channels 14 – 70. When we bought the house we got digital, adding another twenty channels, forty-five music channels, and a killer “interactive” menu. When we had our son, I watched TV every day for two months while we coped with round the clock baby maintenance and I recovered from a cesarean. A few months ago I noticed our son was addicted.

When the TV is on, this almost three-year-old cannot be distracted. Smaller kids often play while the TV is on, but the older they get the more their attention becomes devoted to the tube. The only way to get his attention without turning it off is to get between him and the screen and touch him. Then, needless to say, he’s annoyed.

I also found I was using TV as a reinforcer—rewarding by allowing it and punishing by taking it away. This is a surefire way to increase the desirability of anything.

“It is, in fact, the parents for whom television is an irresistible narcotic, not through their own viewing (although frequently this, too, is the case) but at a remove, through their children, fanned out in front of the receiver, strangely quiet.”

Mary Winn, The Plug-In Drug

When Ben was in the room, our choice of around 100 channels narrowed to five: PBS, Animal Planet, Nickelodeon, Disney, and Cartoon Network. Since we all despise commercials, we mostly watched PBS and Disney, which are still, like all kids’ programming, commercials for themselves. Licensing is where the money is, and TV is never about anything except money.

Selling Out

Disney has always been this way. Seventy licensing deals for toys, clothes, snacks, etc. had been signed before the release of Snow White in 1938. The idea is simple: make the kids love the characters so they will want the merchandise—not just toys but clothes, shoes, sunglasses, bedding, furniture, décor, calendars, books, backpacks, food, drinks, flatware, lamps, clocks, toothbrushes, band-aids®, bathroom sets, CD players, diapers—anything that can be branded. Even, or in Disney’s case especially, vacations.

Any book on marketing today will tell you that the youngest children are the most intensely targeted. Gaining “mindshare” at an early age virtually guarantees brand loyalty in adulthood. Talk like that gives me the heebie-jeebies, but that is how they talk.

PBS was much less of an ogre until deregulation and slashes to public funding. Since then they’ve had to imitate their corporate competitors. Ever wonder why PBS would take on Teletubbies, a show aimed at preverbal toddlers and infants, when the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommends children under two watch no television at all? PBS sold their soul for licensing rights. Chuck E. Cheese’s and Kellogg’s don’t mind a bit.

You Are What You Eat

Children and adults who watch a lot of TV are more fearful and less creative. While television helps to build those parts of the brain responsible for scanning and shifting attention, it is at the expense of those components that maintain attention and perhaps even those which facilitate abstract reasoning. It almost goes without saying that the more TV a person watches the less they read. And, one of the most consistent findings, more hours in front of the tube equals a greater likelihood of being obese.

I doubt there’s anybody left who would argue that unmitigated TV viewing is good for anyone. But how much is enough and how much too much? The AAP recommends 1 to 2 hours a day for kids, which is right around half of the four hour daily dose the average preschooler takes in.

Grown Up Reasons to Maim Your Television

So, why not just restrict my kid’s viewing? Well, for starters, I am bad at it. First I would say he could watch one show. Then I would get involved with something and another show would start. I’d decide to let him finish watching that one, because I really believe stories should have endings. And on it went, only to conclude with his short but inevitable burst of anger when I turned it off.

I missed the silence and free time created by not having cable. Getting the cable bill caused distress. Were we really getting $50 worth of entertainment every month from these channels when there never seemed to be anything on? How many DVDs could we rent or buy for $600 a year? How often were we being suckered by commercials? How much money and time does cable really cost?

Disconnected

It used to be that without TV you were excluded from a defining cultural event. Before the explosion of channels, there was a good likelihood that friends and neighbors were all watching the same thing. Not so now that there are channels catering to smaller and smaller market segments. Indeed, it’s likely that people in the same house aren’t even watching the same program.

Miss America, the Olympics, Presidential debates: none of these draw nearly the audience it used to. Even the Superbowl is losing viewers. So, I don’t feel we’ll be too detached from mainstream America because of this decision. I do feel we’ll participate more within the family and possibly in the community because of it.

“The primary danger of the television screen lies not so much in the behavior it produces as the behavior it prevents—the talks, the games, the family festivities and arguments through which much of the child’s learning takes place and his character is formed.”

Uri Bronfenbrenner

TV does not bring the family together, as some advocates would avow. When the TV is on, people go into a sort of trance, conversation stops, eyes glaze over. It does provide common references, leading people to communicate in catch phrases and base their ideas of reality on shallow stereotypes. Heavy viewers think there’s more violence, less altruism, and that more people are wealthy than in real life. They are more likely to think minorities are violent, women are incompetent, and scientists are dangerous and peculiar.

But I do not think TV is intrinsically evil. In fact it serves several beneficial purposes. It can educate and inform; it can let us see what life is like in distant places; and, occasionally, it can truly entertain. So, we haven’t gone cold turkey. And we have some habits that might make the experts cringe. Ben and his dad still watch Saturday morning cartoons for as long as they please, and sometimes Ben’s DVD time exceeds the AAP RDA. I don’t ask the babysitter to restrict Ben’s viewing any more than she does with any other kid. And at relatives’ and friends’ houses I just try to make sure it’s age appropriate and doesn’t preclude all constructive play.

Most egregiously, we watch the Simpsons while we eat dinner almost every night. This is a huge sin according to the literature. I don’t feel bad about it at all. We skip episodes and segments Ben might find upsetting (e.g., Treehouse(s) of Horror and Itchy and Scratchy). We talk about how antisocial behaviors get us in trouble. The three of us laugh at totally different parts.

The worst thing about watching TV during dinner for most families is that dinnertime is the only time they have to sit down and talk. That is just not so for us. Because I’m an at-home mom, we have hours together, every day. I see watching the Simpsons over dinner as one of the perks of having more time.

So, Ben won’t be a cultural retard when he goes to school. But he’ll be less likely to be a junkie, and so will I. We will have more money, not just from paying the cable company less but also from not being exposed to commercials and by being drawn toward fewer licensed characters while in the store. We will also have more time for each other. It only takes a few seconds to flip through 12 channels, find out nothing’s on, and decide to play a game instead. Or go outside. Or read. Or do something else entirely.

The Bad Guy

There are a lot of reasons to get rid of cable: for the quiet and time it affords; for the sleep (people without TV sleep an average of an hour and forty-five minutes more a week); for the ability to introduce topics to your children when they’re ready, rather than when the TV brings the subject into the home. One reason on which I did not act is the idea that television creates violence. As a person who has always sought out the darker side of fantasy, I am unwilling to believe that mere exposure to something instills it. Otherwise, I’d be a hatchet-wielding vampire. When I figure out my own attraction to horror, then maybe I’ll be able to take a stand. In the meantime all I can do is advocate age-appropriate fantasy. Children should not be exposed to evils with which they cannot cope, images for which they have no previous scaffolding to help them comprehend. But if the good guy’s going to win, the bad guy has to be portrayed as bad. That’s storytelling.

For me, the most pressing reason to cut Ben’s television time was consumerism. I don’t want to raise a kid who thinks that life is about stuff. Seeing too many commercials makes you anxious (and probably fat), regardless of your age. Billions of dollars a year go into researching how to make kids insecure so they will try to “fix” themselves with products. There’s the bad guy.

The mere fact that a product bears the image of a licensed character doesn’t make it bad, just suspect. Is it a gimmick? Does it cost more than the same product without the image? A book using SpongeBob or Sesame Street characters may encourage a kid to read, but the same character on flatware probably won’t inspire a love of cooked carrots.

All in all, while getting rid of cable doesn’t seem like that drastic an act right now, it may be one of the most important long-term steps a person can take toward claiming autonomy from the economic-based worldview. If the goal is truly to live deeply, caring deeply and thinking deeply, there’s little else one can do that would have the same impact as turning off the television.

Home Fire

Resources

Jones, Gerard. Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence.
New York; Basic Books, 2002.

Linn, Susan. Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood.
New York; The New Press, 2004.

Pawlowski, Cheryl. Glued to the Tube: The Threat of Television Addiction to Today’s Family.
Naperville, IL; Sourcebooks, 2000.

Schlosser, Erich. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001.

Steyer, James P. The Other Parent: The Inside Story of the Media’s Effect on Our Children.
New York; Atria Books, 2002.

http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/facts_for_features_special_editions/001702.html

Amy Vaughn