By high school graduation, American
children will have put in far more hours in front of the television than
in the classroom. 54% of 2 to 12 year old children say they prefer spending
time with television than with their fathers.
Ralph Nader, "CHILDREN FIRST!"
The television will feed
your child millions of commercials, and their core values will be shaped
by corporations grooming them to become good consumers. Take back
control of your child's youth!
Imagine the following
scene: An executive from New York City knocks on your door. He has
a troop of actors in a truck, he says, and lots of high-tech props.
He offers to bring these actors into your living room, and entertain your
kids... The actors will shoot and stab and maim one another.
The blood will flow. He will come back and repeat these displays
day after day. All you have to do is let him in.
Most parents
would slam the door and call the police. They would charge the man
with attempted child abuse. Yet, essentially this same transaction
takes place every day in America. We barely notice it because it
happens through TV.
Television has done something new
in human history. It has given adults a way to bypass parents, enter
the family living room and speak directly to the kids. As a result,
TV has become this nation's hidden education system. One of the worst things
it teaches our kids is that violence is glamorous and cool and the way
adults solve their problems.
This has been
a big problem almost since the beginning of the TV age. But over
the last decade, while the administration in Washington looked the other
way, violence on TV escalated to record levels. We all know that
crime has many deep roots. But is it a total coincidence that the
kids who absorbed this deluge of bloodshed on the tube during the 80s are
now the teenagers who are mimicking it on the streets of our cities?
Senator
Byron Dorgan, (D-ND)
Television is
unparalleled as a medium enabling corporations to reach and encase children
in the world of products and ideas. And television is the most pervasive
form of family entertainment, widely watched by parents and integrated
into family life.
In terms of
sheer hours alone, TV is by far the most powerful tool to separate children
from parents -- intellectually, emotionally and in terms of values.
It should be no surprise that network executives, marketers and advertisers
view television as providing direct access to children. They know
that it is virtually impossible for a parent to control and monitor all
that children watch. And children do watch a great deal.
Network executives
search for programming which will draw the largest child audience.
They search for programs with excitement, fun, action, violence and cool
graphics, and programs based on popular toys. These types of shows
ensure "eyeballs" which can be sold to the advertisers. Delivering
children's audiences to advertisers is the goal of "free" television.
Little, if anything, appears on the major networks because of its educational
and informational content.
Play is how
a child learns. That is why when children dress up in Mommy or Daddy's
clothing, what they are really doing is trying to understand and learn
about what it's like to be a grownup. Traditionally, parents are
a child's symbol of adulthood. Just like when they pretend to be
an adult they are learning about being adults, when they are violent in
their play they are learning to be violent. The television characters
are more their role models than are the adult figures in their life.
These techniques (the advertisers
use) draw children into the product-centered corporate world, the cumulative
impact of which expands children's "wants" into things that they feel they
"need." Children are entertained by these commercials, and they come
away convinced they need to buy "stuff."
The average
child witnesses more than 8,000 television murders by the time they finish
elementary school and more than 200,000 acts of violence by the time they
are 18 years old. One striking
study on the violence-inducing effects of television violence was the 1991
"Long-Term Effects of Repeated Exposure to Media Violence in Childhood,"
by professors L. Rowell Huesman, Laurie Miller and Leonard Eron of the
University of Michigan and Columbia University. This 30-year study
found a correlation in the amount of television a child watched with their
propensity to engage in violent behavior. It revealed that the male
children who watched a lot of television violence had a higher rate of
lived violence and that the pattern was consistent through their entire
lives. In 1973, Notel, a small town in Canada was finally able to
receive television. (The researchers) carefully studied the effects
of the introduction of television into Notel, tracking a group of first
and second graders for two years. After the two years of television,
the researchers found that the rates of physical aggression in these children
increased by 160%.
Of the two full
months a year that children watch television, much of the content they
see is sexually suggestive. "Today's typical viewer sees about 10,000
scenes of suggested sexual intercourse, sexual comment, or innuendo during
one year of average viewing," according to research by Robert Lichter,
co-director of the Center for Media and Public Affairs. Television
content which emphasizes sex does present a picture of the world that young
people feel they must live up to. A recent survey of 750 children
commissioned by Children Now found that 62 percent of young people believe
television them to take part in sexual activity too soon.
Ralph Nader, "CHILDREN FIRST"
"My Wife And
Kids" is a family comedy with a libido.
One episode
last season involved Jr.'s obsession with self-gratification, spending
hours in the bathroom with lingerie catalogs. At one point he painfully
pronounces to his family, "I think I broke it." This season found
the elder Michael taking Viagra to get aroused for a bedroom romp with
Janet... In anoter episode, Michael and Janet are so loud during
their lovemaking that Kady calls the police, thinking her mother is being
hurt. Her father explains that he and ehr mother were playing the
"roller-coaster game." Kady asks if she threw up afterward.
"No, but she did ride it backwards," Michael replies.
Definitely not
Cosby territory. "This show is about real life and real situations,"
executive producer and star Daman Wayans says. Wayans, the father
of four children, feels there is too much sensitivity about children watching
sexual material on television. "Children are living in a different
kind of reality now," Wayans says. "They can get porno on the Internet.
Kids already know this stuff, and parents need to talk to them according
to their age. And sexuality is important. I'm 41, and sexuality
is important to who I am."
Los Angeles Times Calendar
Section, November 25, 2001
Where are we
initiated into the universe? To answer we need to reflect on what
our children experience over and over again, at night, in a setting similar
to those children in the past who gathered in the caves and listened to
the chant of the elders. The cave has been replaced with the television
room and the chant with the advertisement. At the core of each show,
driving the action, and determining whether or not the show will survive
the season, is the advertisement.
What is the
effect on our children? Before a child enters first grade science
class, and before entering in any real way into our religious ceremonies,
a child will have soaked in thirty thousand advertisements. The time
our teenagers spend absorbing ads is more than their total stay in high
school. None of us feels very good about this, but for the most part
we just ignore it. We learned to accept it so long ago we hardly
ever think about it anymore.
But imagine
how different we would feel if we heard about a country that programmed
its citizenry in its religious dogmas in such a manner. In fact,
it was just such accounts concerning the leaders of the former Soviet Union
that outraged us for decades, the thought that they would take young children
and subject them to brainwashing in Soviet lies, removing their natural
feelings for their parents or for God or for the truth of history, and
replacing these with the assumptions necessary for their dictatorship to
continue its oppressive domination.
"A really efficient totalitarian
state would be one in which the...political bosses control a population
of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.
To make them love it is the task assigned to ministries of propaganda,
newspaper editors, and schoolteachers...as the slaves daydream under the
influence of dope and movies and the radio."
Aldous Huxley, BRAVE NEW WORLD
REVISITED (1958)
What we need
to confront is the power of the advertiser to promulgate a world-view that
is based on dissatisfaction and craving. On of the cliches for how
to construct an ad captures the point succinctly: "An ad's job is
to make them unhappy with what they have." As we soak it all up,
it sinks down deep in our psyche. And if this takes place in the
adult soul, imagine how much more damage is done in the psyches of our
children, which have none of our protective cynicisms but which draw in
the ad's imagery and message as if they were coming from a trusted parent
or teacher.
Advertisers
in the corporate world draw talent from the highest strata of IQs.
And our best artistic talent. And any sports hero or movie star they
want to buy. Combining so much brain power and social status and
the most penetrating psychological techniques, these teams of highly intelligent
adults descend upon all of us, even upon children not yet in school, with
the simple desire to create in us a dissatisfaction for our lives and a
craving for yet another consumer product.
Could even one
child in the whole world endure that onslaught and come out intact?
Extremely doubtful. Put it all together and you can see why it's
no great mystery that consumerism has become the dominant world faith of
every continent of the planet today.
Brian Swimme, "THE HIDDEN HEART
OF THE COSMOS"
"We can see what
the media has done to overwhelm all of our sensory experiences with this
recent tragedy (the September 11th bombings)," Brazelton says. "Kids
have been told up to now that STAR WARS and the things they see
from Hollywood were just a fantasy. Well, now they're a reality.
The media is something that I think parents need to learn to control."
That starts, he believes, with parents limiting children's exposure to
TV and violent computer and video games, but also watching these mediums
with their kids and talking about the content.
Interview with T. Berry Brazelton,
LA PARENT MAGAZINE, December 2001
Play is the very
force of society and civilization, and a breakdown in ability to play will
reflect in a breakdown of society. Television replaced story telling
in most homes, and...replaced family conversation in general. With
television on the scene, parents rarely play with children. All sit
around the box, and even playing among siblings has disappeared.
Thus no capacity for play and its internal imaging develops. Nintendo
does not and cannot replace imaginitive play.
Joseph Chilton Pearce, "EVOLUTION'S
END"
"They'll have that repeated
forty or fifty times more...'til at last the child's mind is these suggestions,
and the sum of these suggestions is the child's mind."
