by Alexandra Pollard

Created on: April 04, 2009   Last Updated: April 06, 2009

Children are the most precious thing most people ever get in their lives. Here we have a human mind still being shaped. Everything they see is important to us as parents, because we know that what they see now can effect how they make their decisions in the future and television is a huge part of this.

In our media driven society, televisions are everywhere, our children watch television, at home, in school, at their friends houses, in restaurants, doctors offices and stores. But is this a good thing? Is the influence that television has on our children beneficial? As a parent, I don't think it is. On cartoon network, a station aimed specifically at our children, we can see evidence that the appliance we have seen for years as a friendly form of entertainment, may in fact be harming our society. A child watching cartoon network is confronted with hundreds of ads depicting sweets, toys, and other things you would expect from a children's station. But these ads have a huge effect on our children. Seeing sugary foods marketed to them over and over again, promotes obesity and poor eating choices, toy ads aim to make your children want the latest and greatest inundating them into the world of the consumer before they can understand money.

Still not convinced? Flip through your cable networks. How much of what they are watching promotes violence, unprotected sex, or an unhealthy body image? Television is a marketing machine, capable of brainwashing our kids into a society that they have no idea how to interact in.

But without television, parents control the game. The aim of taking away television is not to limit their experiences, but to help show them a better vision of the world. Instead of violence, sex, and stereotypes we can show our children reality, that violence is not the answer, sex must be confronted with knowledge and responsibility and that being unique is a blessing. Without television, we have the opportunity to show our children the actual world, not it's fictional counterpart, and those movies and cartoons that we do watch can be used to inform, not to sell.

Should parents raise their children without television? Yes, and I plan to do so. We only get one shot at being parents, and our children only learn life's lessons once. So with something so important at stake, why let someone else teach your children? It's time to be a parent, and turn off the T.V.

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