Behold every parent's worst nightmare: the six-year-old TV addict. He watches in the morning before he goes off to school, plops himself in front of the set as soon as he gets home in the afternoon and gets another dose to calm down before he goes to bed at night. He wears Bart Simpson T shirts, nags Mom to buy him Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles toys and spends hours glued to his Nintendo. His teacher says he is restless and combative in class. What's more, he's having trouble reading.
Does this creature really exist, or is he just a paranoid video-age vision? The question is gaining urgency as the medium barges ever more aggressively into children's lives. Except for school and the family, no institution plays a bigger role in shaping American children. And no institution takes more heat. TV has been blamed for just about everything from a decrease in attention span to an increase in street crime. Cartoons are attacked for their violence and sitcoms for their foul language. Critics ranging from religious conservatives to consumer groups like Action for Children's Television have kept up a steady drumbeat of calls for reform.
Last week Congress took a small step toward obliging. Legislators sent to President Bush a bill that would set limits on commercial time in children's programming (a still generous 10 1/2 minutes per hour on weekends and 12 minutes on weekdays). The bill would also require stations to air at least some educational kids' fare as a condition for getting their licenses renewed. Bush has argued that the bill infringes on broadcasters' First Amendment rights, but (unlike President Reagan, who vetoed a similar measure two years ago) he is expected to allow it to become law.
$ Yet these mild efforts at reform, as well as critics' persistent gripes about the poor quality of children's TV, skirt the central issue. Even if the commercialism on kidvid were reined in, even if local stations were persuaded to air more "quality" children's fare, even if kids could be shielded from the most objectionable material, the fact remains that children watch a ton of TV. Almost daily, parents must grapple with a fundamental, overriding question: What is all that TV viewing doing to kids, and what can be done about it?
Television has, of course, been an inseparable companion for most American youngsters since the early 1950s. But the baby boomers, who grew up with Howdy Doody and Huckleberry Hound, experienced nothing like the barrage of video images that pepper kids today. Cable has vastly expanded the supply of programming. The VCR has turned favorite shows and movies into an endlessly repeatable pastime. Video games have added to the home box's allure.
The average child will have watched 5,000 hours of TV by the time he enters first grade and 19,000 hours by the end of high school -- more time than he will spend in class. This dismayingly passive experience crowds out other, more active endeavors: playing outdoors, being with friends, reading. Marie Winn, author of the 1977 book The Plug-In Drug, gave a memorable, if rather alarmist, description of the trancelike state TV induces: "The child's facial expression is transformed. The jaw is relaxed and hangs open slightly; the tongue rests on the front teeth (if there are any). The eyes have a glazed, vacuous look . . ."