Turn off your TV!

Recently I went to pick up the child of a friend from after school daycare.  I arrived at the tidy brick building, empty playground out front, and went inside.  There I was met by a frightening vision.  The place was an amphitheater in the middle of which sat a huge television.  The children were lounging around, slack-jawed and inactive, watching some uninspired, "children's programming."  

Now, my family doesn't have a television in our house, so I was unprepared for the vision.  You should not have a television in your house either and here are six reasons why not:

• TV is a waste of time.

According to Eldon Taylor, author of the book "Mind Programming" (Link to Amazon) children not yet in school watch approximately 60 hours of television a week.  Obviously, this is an average, but it's a shocking amount of time.  If we consider that competence in a given pursuit takes about 2000 hours, the time little kids spend watching tv in one year is enough time to make them competent to a professional level in some pursuit.

• TV Promotes obesity.

Watching television is a completely passive pursuit.  A study done in 1985 found that the incidence of obesity in children increased by 2% for every hour of television watched per day by children over the age of four - 6% per additional hour for little ones under the age of four.   You can practically see the little kids fattening before your eyes!

• Attention Deficit problems.

A study done in 2004 showed that if little kids, ages one to three, watched a lot of television (between two and four hours per day) they were 28% more likely to develop attention deficit problems by age seven.  This might be because the  fast changes in image and sound habituate them to short attention cycles when they are very young.

• TV is mind control.

Very small children perceive everything as real.  Television gives them a stream of images and sounds that substitutes for real experience, suggesting that they need all sorts of products and giving a synthetic world view.  

• TV promotes a violent world view and violent behavior.  

I gave up watching television about twenty years ago.  At the time I stopped watching I was habituated to the level of violence and suggestive behavior that was acceptable then.  Recently, a friend suggested that I might like to watch a certain prime-time network television show, so I purchased a season of the show on DVD.  I was unable to watch more than two episodes of that show because of the level of extreme violence and peril depicted.  Each network competes with the others and each year the levels of sensation increase.  If you watch regularly you don't necessarily notice the change.

• TV is input-only and contains no creative component

Unlike audio only programming (like being read to) which requires listener visualization, being subjected to hours of audio and visual input moves the viewer into a passive state, turns off the mind and the imagination.  Then, when more entertainment is desired, the habit is to turn the television back on instead of picking up toys or a book.  So television watching becomes an addictive behavior.  

• TV's sole purpose is to promote consumption and therefore a feeling of privation.

 The global financial picture, over the last year, has not been pretty.  While it isn't fair to blame the worldwide financial crisis on the influence of television, it is true that many individuals were tempted into that second or third mortgage on the house in order to acquire the lifestyles and possessions suggested by the advertising on television.  What makes them think they need a motorcycle  AND a boat, and that new camera and a bigger television and that great tropical vacation?

For me the penny dropped when I was traveling in the UK in the early 80s.  There was a discussion on BBC radio about providing televisions to people who couldn't afford the licensing fees.  TV was considered a basic necessity of life.  Now when governments decide a thing is necessary to the lives of their people we should look very closely at the merits of that thing.  When television is a "basic necessity" we should wonder why.

For more reasons to turn off (or better yet, throw away) your tv, visit limittv.org