Blow Up Your TV

by Eva van Loon, PDEd, LLB, MA
(Powell River, BC, CANADA)

One of our local performers, voice scratched by experience, reminds me of a favorite John Prine song:

"Blow up your TV; throw away your paper;
Go to the country; build you a home.
Grow a little garden; eat a lot of peaches;
Try and find Jesus on your own."

This reminds me of the advice I give inquiring parents who want to know What They Can Do to prevent or cure learning disabilities, which goes like this:

"Blow up your TV; throw away your sodas;
give away the Ritalin; try to be home;
get some music lessons; do a lot of dancing;
memorise the tables on your own."



Many parents have their suspicions about drugs anyway, and they're quite ready to hear they've been right all along about piano lessons, having a parent at home, memorising, and the infamous 'New Math' of the Seventies. But, I admit, it's perverse fun to watch them blench at the notion of Doing Without TV.

"But we only let the kids watch a little bit," they invariably protest. "Only the good stuff."
There is no good stuff. Seriously. It's not the content; it's the screen itself. Recent research vindicates what many of us have sensed all along: TV, no matter how good the content, is toxic to children and other living things.

One study has concluded that, for every hour of TV a child under age seven watches daily, on average, there's a 10% greater likelihood of developing ADHD. So, if a child watches ten hours TV per day, it doesn't matter if parents turn off the commercials and restrict content to education and nature channels. Soon, they'll be dealing with ADHD (and paying therapists like me to fix it).
Another study concludes that the human brain makes more high-confidence errors in a cluttered environment. Huh? you say. That means a kid making a zillion mistakes on a video or computer game will still enjoy it, but a kid making an error on a piece of paper or a single problem on an educational TV screen at school will be fighting to keep shreds of self-esteem.

Finally, since 1974 my own experience with kids diagnosed with 'LDs' tells me that the majority have had significant exposure since early childhood to TV and/or computer screens and those are by and large the kids who haven't developed what my generation would consider normal visualisation skills.

Conclusion, Young human brains and half-formed personalities should be severely restricted in access to TV and computer screens. Under seven years old No screens at all, please. Forget Baby Genius stuff you, the parent, are far more important to your young than Einstein or any teacher ever can be. And there's plenty of time after age seven to master keyboarding.

My daughter and I lost TV to post-divorce poverty. She was only eight, but knew well enough to refuse an offer to get it back. I'll never get my homework done, she explained simply. Sixteen years later, neither generation can imagine letting the 'goggle box' back into our houses to wreck our lives.

Go ahead. Blow up your TV. Let's have a TV-blow-up party. Take that, Military-Industrial-Corporatocracy! One small step for a family a giant step towards reclaiming our brains.

(from R U Speshul, Ed by Eva van Loon (Cognition Therapist), The Pack Press, 2009. Reprints must include this statement.)