Better limit your child's screen time

So is the current concern over the ill effects of children's television warranted, or just a symptom of overanxious parenting? After all, we all turned out fine. Why shouldn't our children enjoy this handy, accessible form of entertainment, which coincidentally has the advantage of offering overworked parents a much needed break from entertaining or supervising their young?

The simple fact is that television is not the same as it was when we were young. Most of us grew up with perhaps a dozen channels, only a small handful of which had content for children - and even then, not very many programs, and only at certain times of the day. Much of what we watched was likely produced fairly close to home and reflective of our culture. Nowadays, the situation could not be more different. The proliferation of available channels, along with on-demand programming, makes entertainment easily available at any time of the day. Shows for children no longer have that rarity value that often encouraged the whole family to gather around the TV. They have become commonplace, and having the express function of keeping our children occupied. As such, they have to be eye-catching enough to instantly draw them in and keep them riveted.
Studies show that when children watch TV, their brain waves and metabolism are actually less active than if those same children were sitting immobile and staring at the wall. In the latter scenario, their minds would be active with imagined images. Watching TV, they are totally passive, their minds in an "alpha" state similar to that of people who have been hypnotized. And what sort of messages are reaching them while they are in this passive, receptive state? Almost uniformly, children's cartoons are fast-paced, flashy, and violent. Those elements are, after all, what draws the eye. The storylines are often crude or downright preposterous and unbelievable to anyone capable of rationalyzing. Young children, in their receptive state, seem to accept them uncritically.
By the time they are 10 or 12 years old, many children have grown desensitized to the violence they see both on TV and in video games. It's a shocking statement if one stops to think about it. They have been exposed to so much fictional crime that the look of it no longer fazes them; they become indifferent to it. But the process of desensitization starts much earlier than that, as children aged 4 or 5 watch those crude, colorful dramas, so simplistic and seemingly harmless to the adult eye.
Is TV itself harmful? Probably not. There are healthy ways to enjoy quality programming for all ages; an ideal way would be if a family gathered together to watch a few, select shows or movies, at "special" times, not part of a daily and solitary routine. The problem, as I see it, is that it has become far too easy to entertain our children with those moving images on a screen, and that we are all too uncritical about their content. It's time to take a step back, eschew some measure of convenience, and consider the real effects of these images and messages on our youngest and most vulnerable members of society.

Email: alaaghamdi@yahoo.com

Source: ARAB NEWS