Good Media
Media and Our Children: Television
Andrea Rock, contributing editor
“Mommy, when can we go to the beach?”
“Not today, Honey, I have a very important client.”
“Mommy, when can I be a client?”
So begins an old AT&T ad — not seen on TV for many years, but one I still use in my presentations to illustrate the subtler side of media’s influence on our kids. Advertising, in order to sell product, must strike a nerve —it must address (or create) a need in our lives and then fill that need. The AT&T ad hits a homerun with working mothers — those opening three lines capture the essence of the working mom’s family/career angst. And if you’ve seen the ad, you’ll know how much more powerfully we are moved by the visuals — the images of the conflicted mom, her suppliant daughters, and the overall impact of a 30-second “story” that is enhanced by top-flight production values.
That and other ads provide a venue to explore the content of television, and in my presentations and workshops we explore values that are imbedded — intentionally and unintentionally — in TV advertising and in programming in general.
Television programs have long been guilty of shallow content. From its earliest days, television’s true purpose — delivering the greatest number of viewers to the advertisers — has forced programs to address the lowest common audience denominator. The exponential growth in the number of cable stations continues to create the need for new material that must literally be pounded out. The writing is increasingly formulaic, even doggerel. And in recent years, it seems as though most television stations are in a race to see who can push the boundaries of decency the farthest. We seem to be in a veritable race to the bottom.
But beyond the sorry state of television content is the problem caused by the very act of watching. And our kids are watching! The average American home has a TV on for seven hours each day, and kids confess to watching an average four of those hours. In her landmark book, Endangered Minds: Why Our Children Don’t Think, Jane Healy, Ph.D, draws on years of neurological research to warn that several factors of our modern lifestyle, including early consumption of too much television, may actually be causing mutations in the hardwiring of our children’s brains. Healy shows that when too much exposure to the fast-paced, image-based world of television is allowed, the left-brain function, the one responsible for language development and critical thinking skills, may be subjugated to the right-brain or emotional function.
She reminds us that in the very visual world of television, words are secondary to pictures and action. Advertisers’ research shows that the best way to grab attention is to play to the brain’s instinctive responses to “salient” features. Sudden movements, loud noises, and bright colors alert us to possible impending danger, so the use of televisual close-ups, zooms, and pans, momentarily triggers our instinct for self-preservation. All television programming — including “educational” TV — capitalizes on these techniques’ stimulation of involuntary brain responses. Even the originators of the much-revered Sesame Street consciously use such “salient” effects in order to keep kids watching whether they wanted to or not.
But, not without unintended consequences. The brain responds to these stimuli by alerting the nervous system. Kids whose nervous systems are stimulated by TV have no outlet for that artificially induced energy, and may wind up being overactive, frustrated or irritable. As far back as 1975, two prescient Australian researchers predicted that Attention Deficit Disorder would increase in direct proportion to children’s consumption of visual media. Surely, not all kids who watch TV develop learning disorders. But heavy viewers are consistently shown to have poorer language and reading skills than their counterparts who watch less. And language and reading skills provide the foundation for all higher-level thinking.
Healy’s theory is not without its critics, but is substantial enough to have influenced the American Academy of Pediatrics, which recommends that parents allow no television for children under age two, then no more than two hours per day of quality programming. With what we now know about television’s potential effects, caution is surely to be advised.
Next month we will look at some organizations that support parents with their media choices.
