Kill the T.V

People functioned for thousands of years without television, the internet, or any electronic screen for that matter. Now it seems we can hardly peel our eyes from them. In the United States it's been shown that 99% of households own at least one television. Not only do almost all of us own televisions but we spend on average almost 7 hours a day with the damn thing on. We are quickly becoming even more controlled by television as Alana Semuels of the Los Angles Times reported that the average hours of television viewing in America has risen by 3.6% from just last year. Now the real problem I find in this rising epidemic of t.v brain washing is the children.

Studies now show that violent behavior isn't the only affect of early television view. It has been concluded that television exposure in children ages 1 to 3 is associated with attention problems by the age of 7. A child's brain at these ages is susceptible to many outside influences that alter the brains development and television has proven to be a harmful one. Now again there are different views on why this is, however, the studies to prove that cognitive problems such as ADHD did not depend on what was being watched but simply watching its self.

The stats of adult's watching television are overwhelming. However, those pertaining to children are even more troubling. The kids health website reported that two-thirds of infants and toddlers watch an average of 2 hours a day. Now many would say there's nothing wrong with watching a little t.v as a child. But how does what a child sees on the screen affect them? Well the first and most alarming fact is that by the age of 18 a child will have seen more than 200,000 acts of violence. As a child before being able to put these acts into context, they might simply establish the idea that violence is simply entertaining. With these images of violence so prevalent on television it almost goes without saying that violence has become as acceptable as saying shit on t.v. For a young child they may not be able to know that this is wrong. If they can watch it, it must be fine.

Violence is very prevalent on television but even more so are commercials. There is the constant debate of whether or not we are becoming increasingly materialistic due to t.v. The average child watches around 20,000 commercials a year, and many of these are directed right at children. The American child is bombarded everyday with images and sounds to buy products, and as a result I feel we have become materialistic monsters. Children are quickly being sucked up by businesses to be molded into perfect consumers. To quote the documentary Super Size Me's opening scene, "Take care of the customer, and the business will take care of its self." Ray Kroc, McDonalds founder. This has proven to be a successful word of advice. The commercials children watch are catered for them, and as a result business has boomed.

The clear answer in my mind is that parents should kill the television. They can revive it once the children grow up, but until then no t.v seems to be the right answer.