Not only do I not think children shouldn't be raised without television, I think children raised in such a way will find themselves at a marked academic and social disadvantage. Online television company, Hulu, has recently bombarded the airwaves with advertisements featuring television stars as closeted aliens. They urge viewers to log on to the site to watch all their favorite shows via the web, in order to turn their brains into mush for alien consumption. While certainly providing an amusing spin on the familiar adage, "television will turn your brain to mush", I must say this has given me pause when considering how I utilize the television as a parent.
It has been the habit of my husband and I to allow our seven year old to watch cartoons until we wake up on Saturday and Sunday mornings. The benefit to us was that we got to sleep late, and our son was happy watching his favorite programming. However, when we did wake up and join our boy in the living room, we found the shows to be silly and pointless. I can't claim that Thundercats or GI Joe satisfied any educational requirement, but there were certainly lessons about honor and commitment hidden in those cartoons. Nowadays, there is barely a moral to the stories our children are watching. So what do we do? Should we completely eliminate television for our children?
The answer is no. Cartoons merely make up a small percentage of television programming. There are loads of shows on that would benefit, not only our children, but us as well. After we discovered that our son was having trouble focusing in school, we decided to cut out television which is written for people with short attention spans, namely cartoons. We implemented a rule that when he was in our house, he could only watch approved programs on the Discovery Channel, National Geographic Channel, and the History Channel (to name a few). Since this rule has been in effect I can say that we have all learned something new. The level of conversation has risen up from SpongeBob to the different kinds of animals that live in the ocean, or the way WWI set up the current turmoil in the Middle East.
That being said, there is a certain social aspect that television brings to a child's life. Kids on the schoolyard are more likely to discuss the latest episode of Bakugan than current events. Unfortunately, our son is only with us on the weekends, and we know that he gets to watch an hour or two of cartoons during the week. However, were he to live with us full time we would allow him to choose a few shows to watch, and use those as rewards for getting his homework and daily chores done on time. This would strike up a safe balance between using the television for recreation and education.
Raising children without television is the opposite extreme of using it as a babysitter. Truth be told, it is a function of lazy parenting on either side. As parents we are responsible for being diligent and aware of what our children are being exposed to. None of us were given a manual, and we can only do the best we can. It is up to us to raise the expectations of what "the best" really means.