TV and AcculturationPosted by admin on June 29th, 2009
It is high on the list of decisions we parents must make every day, right next to when and what to feed our kids, which books to read with them, when the mess becomes too big, and how long to let them linger in the bathtub: whether or not to allow them to stare at the good old boob tube.
I’ll admit that we watch a lot of TV in my house. Between our morning dose of political news, frequent lazy afternoons spent watching HGTV, and my husband’s beloved Cubs games, our son’s exposure far exceeds the recommended amount of ZERO hours for his age group. It can no doubt become a habit, providing chatter to fill the silence. Often, the noise of the TV becomes the soundtrack for all our other activities, even those that we prefer to do in silence, like reading. But, I wonder: are we prompting a future attention “disorder,” creating missing links in our baby’s brain? Or are we doing him a service by establishing a habit of worldly exposure and a tool for critical culture analysis?
While I believe my husband when he emphatically (and frequently) tells me that multitasking only provides an illusion of productivity, I also think there is value in having the capacity to process many different types of information at once. For that is what we have to do in order to keep up our buzzing, 24/7 way of life. Consider TV, cell phones, computers, and breaking news to be evil if you prefer, but they are all necessary in order to fully function in Western society.
In a recent volume of The Sun magazine, there was an article on the way that life in the era of Google has changed our brains. It is a debate amongst psychologists and techies alike: are we losing the ability to, for example, read an entire article without losing interest? If so, is this inherently bad? Have websites flanked with enticing ads, easy access to search results, and the ability to open multiple browser tabs actually made us higher-functioning?
Neither side of the brain-centered argument is our everyday justification for indulging in pop culture with a side of CNN, though. Most of us probably have a much more mundane answer for why we spend our evenings with TiVO. We want to be entertained. We want to laugh, cry, and be reminded that the world is greater than our living rooms. Sure, today’s programming is littered with unrealistic portrayals of reality, but it also contains plenty of human-interest stories and unique views into parts of the world to which we would never have access if not for the ubiquity of cable. It may be in a different form than it was in other periods in history, but this type of connection — think Planet Earth and CBS News Sunday Morning — is no less important than community meetings and village bonfires used to be.
This week’s rash of celebrity deaths and the accompanying documentaries on some of our culture’s most esteemed figures have brought me an opportunity to reflect upon my level of cultural participation. I watched a good amount of TV growing up, listened to pop music, and read trashy fashion magazines. I don’t see myself as ruined because of these things. On the contrary, I am proud to be part of the crowd of people mourning the loss of the moonwalking mogul because of the positive associations I have with nearly every one of his songs.
Maybe I was insulated from the detritis because I always had a book in front of my face blocking out some of the toxic images. Maybe I was not insulated and I’m completely delusional in evaluating my own level of ruin. Maybe it’s not detritis at all.
All I know is: I don’t want my kids to be cut off from our world, for all its good and its bad, because of some conservative adherence to the tenets of a simpler time. I won’t feign innocence if I am someday accused of teaching my son to work my desktop tablet and play the Wii at much too young an age, but I doubt that these are truly the meat ‘n’ potatoes of raising a well-rounded child.
And there’s this: Researchers at Harvard and Children’s Hospital in Boston recently found that TV is neither beneficial nor harmful to a baby’s cognitive development. It has only been concluded that TV gets in the way of meaningful conversation and other bonding activities that could be going on in its place. (Duh?)
As with any mechanized entertainment, TV requires an ongoing judgment call on the part of parents. I am okay with my son pointing and squealing every time there’s a dog on TV, as long as he goes right back to reading Brown Bear, Brown Bear when the dog disappears.
