Tune TV Out

by Odds Bodkin

As I listened to NPR yesterday I heard an unsettling story about children -- eight, nine, ten years old -- who suffer from depression. How interesting it would be to do a study to determine how much TV these children view, and how few stories they've been read or told. In other words, just how stunted are their imaginations?

And just how bored are they with real life? Bored, you say? How can a child be bored with life? I'm afraid it's terribly easy nowadays to precondition your children for boredom and depression. Here's how to do it: Sit them in front of a television from infancy onward and make the mistake of thinking the stories they see there are in any way equivalent to the stories in books. TV stories are radically different.

Here's why:
Any TV creative team worth its salt knows one thing: pacing is everything. Things must move. Don't stay with an idea too long. Even Sesame Street, touted as beneficial to growing young minds for an entire generation, flips quickly from vignette to vignette, careful not to challenge young viewers with anything longer than a goofy song.

Meanwhile, Rugrats, a delightful cartoon within its own terms, flickers from scene to scene at a tremendous rate. These are good TV shows, make no mistake. But children, being intelligent creatures, adjust the speed of their sensory and cognitive processing to match the speed of TV's pacing. Isn't that good, you say? Doesn't that develop quick minds?

Perhaps. But there's a dark side. When children watch too much, their minds become conditioned to TV's frenetic pace. Their minds basically "rev" at a higher speed. What happens, then, when the TV goes off and suddenly real life, with its much slower tempo, seats itself squarely in their paths? It's boring, frankly. It's too slow. No half-second scene shifts. There's no background music adding significance to one's thoughts or actions. Now that's depressing. Life looms ahead, a tired, slow, boring show, filled with effort and adults using words. And without active imagination to provide the dazzling entertainment it has given children for millennia, it's no wonder pharmaceutical firms are expecting your business.

Children are turning up depressed by the millions. Why? Part of the answer is that it's hard to hope if you can't imagine.