by Charles Chen

Created on: April 04, 2009

Everybody knows it is Alexander Graham Bell that invented the telephone, but you probably don't that John Logie Baird is the inventor of television, which is as important an invention as telephone. In fact, to be accurate, there is no exact inventor of television; actually many people had some kind of contribution to it. It's out of question that television is one of the greatest things we human ever created.

But there come the problems, television, as a way of relaxation and entertainment may have take up too much of our lives, in fact, so much that some people even wonder that, should the parents raise their children without television?

To be frank, the first time I saw this question I felt it a little ridiculous to come up with such question. But after a few minutes of further thinking, it just became more and more complicated, not so simple as it seemed to be.

There are enough reasons for parents to abandon the televisions. The concern may include that their children may become the next generation of couch potatoes, which we have already been acting for a long time. For many of us, television is used to relax or for entertainment, but except that, they are filling our leisure time with endless advertisements or other unwelcome information. Besides, we are also worried that the television may provide something inappropriate to our children, like movies that include too many scenes of sex.

However, are those reasons enough for us to ban TV to the children? Well, my answer is no.

To live a life without television makes little difference, to solve the problems, and it is not actionable, neither. We
can't just throw our TVs away and tell the children, "Listen, you should never watch it!" That is not likely to work. As a matter of fact, the more we feel afraid of it, the children just get more and more interested in it, which of course, is not the result we'd expected.

Television is not the only source of all the problems we're facing. Even if we hadn't invented TV, which we thought to be the course of many problems, there will be other things to replace them. It is the law of the society or market: where there is a need, there is a product. We now have PC or Mac to present video or anything we want to watch. Actually PCs are providing much more services than TV can do, but at the same time, they also brought more problems. So it does not count much just to throw the TVs away; there is always a long list of newest products that can do much more than the traditional television.

We cannot stop the development of the society. Raising children without television is just the most passive action we can take. As mentioned above, that does little to help, only making problem even more complex. We should do something more positive to protect the children from all the problems we now suffer. Having better and more frequently communication with the children is much more important and effective than purely making orders that they should do or not do something.

As the saying goes, do as you would be done by. Think about the pleasures televisions have given to you when you are still children. Why must we do something we ourselves could not accept to the children? Why not just let it go as it should be and we act as guiders, not dictators?

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