Idolising Children?

I really enjoy reading domestic father (Blake) and I’ve been meaning to write about his series of post that use his skeptical approach to the impact of TV viewing on young children. I’d like to do this because TV is a focus of a chapter in the book that my wife has written (and which I’ve thrown bits and pieces into). It is due in mid-2009 and clearly you’ll get more information in coming months.

It all starts here with a post questioning whether TV is a positive or negative influence on children’s lives. Blake admits that he and his wife did limit TV in their daughters early years, not because of a wealth of research, but simply through their own personal experience. He writes:

I enjoy it when skeptics get intuitive. I think there is room in an evidenced-based approach to allow decisions to begin to be made by posing and questioning through the lived experience. And, in this case, that is clearly what has happened. As the following posts then explored the research in a very nice way.

Television and Infants is a fabulous blog post. It systematically asks the questions we all pose, and looks throughly at the evidence available to cut through the marketing hype and recognise that TV is having an impact on the development of our children, especially in the early years, and in ways that we can recognise, but still do not fully understand.

I recommend all parents and parents-to-be read it. But, I also recommend that parents then don’t suddenly beat themselves up if their children have watch a large amount of TV before they were 5.

Which, is where the next question comes in that Blake hasn’t addressed - yet: When should my child start watching television and when should they watch?

This is where our new book will come in, exploring the research behind not just how much TV is enough, but what children should watch and more importantly, how they should watch it and how you should watch it with them.

If we are toi raise good critical thinkers we need to teach them how to watch TV and engage with new media technologies in the same way we teach them to read books. We need to give them the vocabulary, the processes and teach them rules about how to be a good media consumer - how to challenge where the information comes from, teach them to ask who made this program, what are they telling me, why do they want to tell me that, are they trying to sell me something?

This is what we need to think about and consider as parents - and in doing so we need to accept there is not a single solution. There is no one book, one way, one TV show that can provide us with the answers. All our children are uniquer and require us to critically engage with their own development, and travel the journey of mistakes and successes with them.

Tags: children, capacity, tv, early years