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Would you offer your hungry child a basketful of junk food, randomly plucked off the shelves of the mini-mart? Would you allow your child to eat a sandwich that a stranger handed them on the street?

Silly questions, right? No parent with an ounce of conscience would do these things. And yet the same conscientious parents, who take such care to safeguard the health of their children's growing bodies, are abandoning their responsibility to nourish and protect their children's vulnerable brains.

The U.S. Department of Education estimates that children watch an average of 28 hours per week of television.. During weeks when school is in session, the typical American child spends about as much time in the classroom as they do in front of the TV. School, however, occasionally stops for summer and holidays - but the TV in your livingroom probably never takes a vacation! This means that on a yearly basis, most American children spend more time watching TV than they do at school. And it starts early; seventy percent of daycare centers report using television during at least part of their daily routine.

Sounds a little out of control, doesn't it? "But", you might say, "I only let my child watch educational programs. So it's ok - she's actually learning something."

Well, parents who can truthfully make that claim deserve credit for exercising part of their responsibility . But it turns out that, while being careful about what your children watch will provide them some protection from TV's bad effects, it doesn't address the deeper damage that TV can cause. In other words, it's true that there's a problem with WHAT children are watching, but there is a bigger problem with HOW MUCH they are watching. It's easy to confuse these two issues, so let's look at them separately:

WHAT they are watching:

The overriding purpose of all commercial television programming is to sell ads, in order to increase corporate profits. The advertisers are not sponsoring television shows with our children's interests in mind. They have one motivation, and that is to keep children's attention on the ads, in order to recruit new buyers for their products. A task force of child development experts at the American Psychological Association has done research which proves that children under the age of 8 do not understand the inherent bias of advertising. Children's innocence, which leads them to trust what they are told, is worth a lot of money to advertisers, and commercial television is the marketplace

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