Effective Parenting Skills - Do Today's Kids See Life As One Big Commercial?

by: Ken Mathie

It still often true today that television is a "babysitter" for adult caregivers and preschoolers, or even infants. Too often, when people are bored or want to rest, they watch TV. This is true even if programming is not particularly interesting to them. They may even need the TV to help them go to sleep. If you turn it off, oftentimes, these people wake up.

Today's myriad of channels and access to the remote control makes television an engrossing experience. It can be easy to confuse which characters go with which plot. When you switch channels rapidly during commercial breaks, you can follow several shows at the same time. However, it's probably prudent to stop this at least occasionally and choose one program, then stick to it.

Children are as guilty of this as adults, perhaps more, because their attention spans aren't quite as long as adults' are. This also often happens because children are much more prone to imitate what adults in authority do rather than what adults say, especially parents. Therefore, if you are a champion channel surfer, then your child is likely to be too. So if you find your child saying, as you try to grab the remote control from his or her hand, "But, Dad, it's a commercial!", take a long look at your own behavior before you do any scolding. If you find yourself doing this behavior, then curtail your own channel surfing in order to control that of your child.

When it comes to what to watch on television, again, there are a myriad of programs to choose from. You can choose just about anything: there are channels devoted to sports, cartoons, foreign language shows, soap operas or game shows, for example. You can also choose from movie channels that include every different type of movie. Parental controls can help parents choose just what content their children watch, even without their supervision.

Regardless of what children actually watch on television, just the sheer volume of television can be too much for children. It can train them to feel that they should always be entertained and never "bored." Therefore, take care to intersperse television watching with periods of both one-on-one interaction and actual physical play. For quality shows, turn to such programs as the ever-classic Sesame Street to teach little ones actual concepts they’ll need later on.

Violence is becoming increasingly graphic on television, and again, parental controls can help with this. However, by the age of 12, children see thousands of murders on television, typically. Therefore, limit exposure to violent programming as much as possible. This is especially true for very young children, who haven't the means to process it and may experience nightmares from it. In some cases, children may even act out because of the violence they've seen on television.

Commercial volume is another problem with today's television programming. Children are exposed to one glitzy product or toy after another, touting them to buy this or that. Sugary breakfast cereal commercials are the order of the day for morning cartoons, for example. Again, you can limit this by both limiting television programming and perhaps taping shows for children with the commercials deleted. Of course, they'll still be exposed to this or that best "toy" because of their friends, for example, but they'll be less likely to be forever enticing you to buy them something. And although cigarette ads are banned from television, the same does not hold true for alcohol, which often shows alcohol as enhancing a sophisticated lifestyle. Therefore, children should also be exposed to these types of commercials as little as possible.

Even college students are not immune to the effects of television. Professors these days express their frustration with college students raised on television; their attention spans may be as limited as about 15 minutes. This can lead to something as severe as attention deficit disorder, although many experience something less severe than this. Regardless, television watching can literally "retrain" the brain in terms of attention span and thinking processes, so that becoming absorbed in a task that does not have the same glitz and glamour as television is much more difficult for students today than it was a generation ago.

Students these days also expect to be entertained in the way the television programs do, so that the traditional lecture, for example, does not do the job. Therefore, many students of this generation have difficulty with traditional learning methods, such as book reading or notetaking. Unlike television, reading develops the imagination on a different way, since one must picture characters in a story, for example, in his or her own mind. This is a skill that is progressively becoming more difficult to find.

In addition, television's images are fast-paced, so that life appears fragmented rather than continuous, interspersed as it is with commercial breaks. In addition, if one becomes bored with what is on television, you can simply change the channel. This fosters a sense of the need for "immediate gratification" and boredom if one does not receive this.

Nonetheless, as a medium, television is here to stay. Therefore, to at least some extent, it should be used to educate young people in addition to entertaining them. Public service ads can inform young people about the dangers of smoking, drug use, or drinking and driving, for example. Real-life crime show programs ask citizens to participate by calling in tips about a criminal's location, for example. This type participation has greatly helped law enforcement catch otherwise hard to find criminals.

As cable channel to expand and competition for space increases, new ways will have to be found to fill programming. One way to do this is to have the government subsidize alternative TV shows that can offer entertainment, education and local talent access in addition to traditional fare. Already, local access cable stations provide some of this programming, as does the Public Broadcasting System.

Today, we are bombarded round-the-clock with information, images, and sights and sounds, and can often get conflicting messages. This is difficult enough for adults to decipher, but it's even more difficult for young people. Therefore, steps should be taken so that children of the TV generation do not become slaves to "television mentality," where problem solving is shortchanged or they must continually be entertained to learn anything. As they grow and mature, they might have difficulty learning and making choices through more traditional methods.

Nonetheless, you can balance this by making television part of your day rather than an integral centerpiece of it. Limit television watching to one or two hours a day, if that. Limit time on games such as video games or computer time to time spent doing homework, with the rest of the time spent interacting with real people and friends. Although difficult at first, just like any other habit, children will learn to accommodate this in their lives and will have better balance for it.