How to beat TV addiction in four not-so-easy lessons
The television, its electrical cord trailing in the dirt like a useless tail, its great eye blank in the midday sun, was sitting in the center of the playground. In a semicircle around it stood a dozen four-year-olds, their eyes glazed, staring intently at the dark screen. Three adults emerged from the adjacent schoolhouse and lifted the set into the back of a station wagon. As the car pulled away, several of the children rushed to the wire fence, pushed their outstretched hands through the loops, and cried plaintively: "Goodbye, Mr. TV. Goodbye, Mr. TV."
This incident, says Professor Seymour Feshbach, chairman of the psychology department at U.C.L.A., occurred at a Los Angeles nursery school. Margaret Mead might have described the scene as a tribal rite of the global village; Marshall McLuhan might cite it as proof that the medium is indeed the message. But to Professor Feshbach as well as to Joan Anderson Wilkins, a researcher on family issues, it was not a symbol but an illustration of something more portentous: television addiction. Those nursery-school students are video junkies.
In her new book, Breaking the TV Habit (Scribners; $9.95), Wilkins describes the telltale signs and dangers of television addiction and offers a straightforward four-week program to break the habit without severe withdrawal symptoms. Addiction may be a metaphor, but the reality, according to Wilkins, is that among American children, television ranks second only to sleeping as a consumer of hours. The average American, both child and adult, watches more than six hours of television daily. By the age of 14, a devoted viewer will have witnessed 11,000 TV murders, claims Wilkins, and will digest 350,000 commercials before graduating from high school. A recent study at Michigan State University discovered that when four-and five-year-olds are offered a hypothetical choice between giving up television or their father, one-third will decide not to make room for Daddy.
What effect does habitual viewing have on children? Wilkins cites major studies that have reported a relationship between increased watching and decreased learning, between violence on television and aggressive behavior. Wilkins approvingly quotes Cornell Psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner, who once said: "The danger of TV lies not so much in the behavior it produces as in the behavior it prevents." Some examples: communication between parent and child, the capacity to entertain oneself, the ability to express ideas logically and feelings sensitively. Television, suggests Wilkins, does not sever children from reality, it becomes their reality, more vivid than the outside world to which it supposedly refers.