May 2009

I recently commented on Rational Jenn’s latest post about how she handles her children’s screen time.  There’s been a great discussion in the comments and Jenn asked me to clarify my own.  So since I do take requests, here’s an expanded version of my view on the matter. 

In general, I don’t think there is anything wrong with television, movies, and video games.  They all have their place and they are Good Things.  So let’s get the extreme views out of the way.

It is quite obvious that sitting in front of a screen like a zombie for hours and hours a day is just a waste of precious time.  Movies and television shows are entertainment (and sometimes art), to be used for relaxation and as a break (and sometimes as spiritual fuel).  By definition, this should supplement your usual activities, not take them over.  The same goes for video games which are less passive, but still fundamentally recreation.  Let’s all agree that watching too much TV is bad for kids and adults alike.  We’ll get more specific later.

On the other hand, some people view all screen time as inherently bad, for all ages.  I can’t even imagine a reason for this view, it is so absurd.  I think the only reason anybody even considers it is because of the horrible morality of renunciation called Christianity.  Christianity damns every conceivable human pleasure, including sex, eating for pleasure, using technology to ease physical burdens, and even dancing.  We now scoff at some of these sacrifices (see, Footloose) but even those of us who have explicitly rejected religion sometimes succumb to elements of the morality it has infused into our culture.  Altruism and sacrifice in general are seen as noble acts, and the mind-body dichotomy is everywhere in our culture.  We are suspicious of anything that appeals to our lowly physical needs, because it is the spiritual that we should be focused on.  Television is seen as a pleasure of the body, not the mind/spirit, and so it can’t be good.  But, as always, the evil can’t survive without the good.  Nobody can act consistently on false ideas, or they would die.  Without relaxation, humor, and physical pleasure, life would not be worth living.  So, many people start from this premise but moderate it by deciding that TV is ok in small doses, or that television shows are bad but movies are good, or that video games are allowable because they can be educational.  Although there are rational reasons for those views, what I’m saying is that much of the time, I suspect people are coming from the irrational premise and just happening to arrive at a reasonable place.  I think it is absolutely critical to reject the bad premise from the start and to state emphatically that, fundamentally, television, movies and video games are values.  Whew!  It felt good to write that because that kind of renunciation makes me very angry.

But just because something is good doesn’t mean that it is good for everybody, all the time.  Enter: children and television.  We’ve already eliminated the extreme views.  Obviously we don’t want our kids to be zombies and we don’t want to deny them pleasure or teach them that pleasure is bad. 

I take the position that some kinds of TV and movies are inappropriate because they are not intelligible at the child’s level of development.  But I must say that as long as the viewing time is limited, it makes no difference because the majority of the child’s environment will be intelligible.  What we must avoid is too much sensory data that the child simply can’t grasp, or he will start to develop a metaphysical world-view that he is not capable of understanding his environment.  In other words, for all you Objectivists out there, you don’t want to give him a malevolent-universe-premise: the core belief that the world and/or people are unintelligible and he cannot use his mind and act to achieve values.

This is exactly the Montessori principle of giving the child a challenge, but making it something that is possible to succeed with.  You give a one-year-old blocks, but not Lego’s.  You give a two-year-old a pegboard but not a shoelace to tie.  There is a hierarchy of knowledge, and for babies and toddlers who are learning to resolve the chaos into entities and to observe cause and effect, TV is simply inexplicable.  It’s not that they can’t understand how the CRT or the radio signal works.  It’s not even that TV is “pretend” or displayed on a screen.  It’s that they can’t possibly understand the content of most children’s shows.

I really think that it would take quite a bit of chaotic input to harm the child this way.  But it would take a whole lot less than 2 hours a day, which you might say is reasonable for an adult.   As a baby, it actually probably matters less.  Babies don’t even perceive entities when they are first born.  They must learn to integrate the sensory data they observe into percepts and then entities.  While they are in this state, and even some time after, I think there are some great things they can watch on TV.  One video I liked to let Sam watch when she was little was a Baby Einstein DVD with classical music and images of movement and color in the form of toys spinning, water flowing, and lights dancing.  I wouldn’t say that this type of video is going to make your child smarter, but I do think that the rhythmic, isolated movements were exactly what she was able to process.  Also, occasionally watching the nightly news with its discussions of violence, or even a wrestling match would be less of a concern for a baby than for an older child, since they couldn’t make anything out of it anyway.

I think by 1 or 2 years old, the child can distinguish that there are characters acting on the screen and that it is “pretend” in some vague sense, and also, if they have been read to a lot, that there is a story.  I know they can’t really understand “pretend,” but they can understand that the things they are seeing are on a screen, not in the real environment around them, and that this has some different status.

But what are they showing on the typical shows for that age group?  I tried Dora the Explorer and there was a representation of a cursor on the screen moving around and pointing to things and making a clicking noise.  WHAT?  The things Dora was doing had no relationship to anything my child does.  She was traveling and solving mysteries or something.  I don’t think watching that show occasionally will harm my child, but why bother?  I much preferred to let Sam watch another Baby Einstein DVD which had nice music and scenes of airplanes, boats, cars, and trains.  She had seen all of those things in real life and was just learning all of their names.  Again, I don’t think it’s “educational” so much as it is simply intelligible.

We also watch Little Bear which has talking animals.  That actually bothers me a little, but not enough for me to ban all shows and books with talking animals – there would hardly be anything left!  But Little Bear is a show about a child, in the form of a bear, who does things that children do.  Little Bear chases a dandelion fluff to make a wish.  Little Bear breaks a treasured item and tries to put it back together.  Little Bear gets sick and his friends can’t come over so he is lonely.  Little Bear wants to stay up all night but eventually falls asleep.  Once a child can understand stories, I think this is a perfect kind of television show.  Also, importantly, each story is about 8 minutes long.  Movies, no matter how simple, are just too long for a 2-year-old.

There are probably plenty of other good shows.  I like The Backyardigans, but I only let Sam watch it occasionally because I think it’s just a bit too advanced.  We watch Milo and Otis together sometimes, but she can’t last long enough to watch the whole thing, and parts of it are scary.  We also watch videos on YouTube:  swing dancing, ballet, whales jumping out of the ocean, funny cats and dogs, funny babies, and Schoolhouse Rock (totally inappropriate cognitive content, but fun music and I just couldn’t wait to show it to her, which is perfectly consistent with my view that a little bit of the unintelligible is just fine).

As for the computer, we now use it only for the videos, music, and typing.  I plan to teach Sam to read, write, and type, pretty much concurrently.  She is already interested in all three, so we often sit down at the keyboard and I’ll help her use one finger to spell out words.  We do the same thing with pen and paper – I guide her hand in making letters and words.  We don’t plan to introduce any other games for quite a while.  If Sam does start reading, we might try something like Starfall, which Rational Jenn recommends.  I think there is nothing wrong with using games like that as a supplement to other, real-world activities.  Again, the danger lies in the loss of experience in the real world.  I think the sandpaper letters are a more important tool than anything you can find on a computer.

Rational Jenn made a point about how there are a million and one things that are unintelligible to a child, and that the whole point is that they need to learn to sort it all out.  What is different about TV?  Nothing, in small doses.  But if a child sits and watches an hour or two of TV every day, it will be one of the biggest parts of his life.  What else does a child do for this long of a time period?  There is something in the idea that TV sucks you in, even when you are not engaged, and that is the only thing that I would call a “danger.”

And so this is where the parenting comes in.  Rational Jenn’s post was all about how she lets her children monitor their own screen time, and she steps in only if she sees that it is going too far.  She also has only a limited selection of programs for them to watch.  I’ll have to take back the comment I made on her blog that I disagree with her, but only a little.  I agree with her in principle, especially after seeing how much she does monitor the content.  Sam is too young to turn on a show for herself, but she already walks away sometimes before I want her to, if she gets bored.  Our neighbors, who are excellent parents, set a time limit for their 8-year-old, but he sets the timer and uses it to remind himself to stop.  I think the amount of screen time a child has does not have to be a huge battle or a big deal, if the rest of the parenting is going well.  I don’t think most kids would want to sit in front of a TV all day if they hadn’t already been trained into it when they were much too young, and if there are enough opportunities made available to them for more interesting pursuits.  Based on Jenn’s post, I’ll be less likely to step in and set a limit on Sam before she has a chance to regulate herself.

There’s one other issue that is nagging at me now:  the issue of appropriate content in books.  We’ve always read Sam anything and everything, but I’m wondering if that isn’t the same mistake as letting a child watch any kind of TV show.  We’ll have to rethink that next time around.

Yes, next time.  We hope.