http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,482-809510,00.html

We are hypnotising our children into TV slavery
Libby Purves


The new “Children’s Commissioner”, if he or she ever
shimmers into existence, will have plenty to look at: struggling social services, beaten children, poor housing, the shameful education of children in public care. These things rightly focus us on extreme neglect. But — although it may seem perverse — my own mind has been dwelling this past week on a far more common maltreatment of small children. There is an epidemic raging, and we barely notice.

Consider the comments of David Bell, the Chief Inspector of Schools, who last week spoke of the “disrupted and dishevelled” upbringing which causes increasing numbers of five-year-olds to arrive at school barely able to converse or behave. The word from primary teachers, he says, is that “youngsters appear less well-prepared for school than they have ever been before”. Whereas 20 years ago there might be one or two “problem” children in each intake, needing to be civilised by the school community, nowadays reception teachers expect that a substantial number of strapping five-year-olds will be unable to communicate, sit still, fasten their buttons or use a knife and fork.

You can blame “dishevelled” homes, but they are a minority. You can tut about working mothers, but as the Joseph Rowntree Foundation points out, current housing and living costs mean that the average family needs 1.5 jobs to stay secure; and the Government is openly determined to chase new mothers out to work. But when we look at the particular qualities of these new problem children — not hostility or misbehaviour as much as social ineptness and inarticulacy — there is something we do not blame enough: one glaring cultural fact. We are a nation of television addicts, and infant lives are being degraded by it.

Shockingly, a survey published last week by the Early Learning Centre found that one in three UK children under four years old has a private television in the bedroom. Even among those who don’t, the use of TV as a babysitter is widespread; a spokesman for the charity Parentline defied Mr Bell’s strictures on television by saying defensively that “If you’re working very hard and you’re tired and your child is fractious . . . you might stick them in front of the TV while you prepare supper.” But we are not talking about those brief interludes. We are talking about children who — like 86 per cent of those surveyed — watch for six hours a day. Seven per cent watched even more.

For tens of thousands of pre-school children, solitude with the TV is the norm, rather than a treat. Either they get it at home, with parents too busy, self-absorbed, depressed, drugged or emotionally chaotic to care what happens as long as the child causes no noise or mess; or else they are in the home of a relative or poor-quality childminder who never turns it off. Even some nurseries have a screen flickering all day. There are homes — middle-class, clean and tidy — where the TV goes on at dawn and is never off. There are children who have hardly ever had a one-to-one conversation, and who are lulled to sleep by bedroom videos. But plenty of small children who are well-fed, own toys and even get the occasional bedtime story still spend far, far too long with the screen.

This matters. It really does. Television is a mild hypnotic: studies measuring brain activity find that even when viewers are apparently mentally involved, after a few minutes the oscillation between alpha and beta brain waves ceases, in favour of a flat, spaced out, alphaalpha pattern. We all know the effect. At the end of a long day’s work we rather treasure it. But it is not a suitable way for a developing infant to spend its day.

A small child is a miracle: programmed to ardent curiosity, exploration and laying down a vital understanding of the basics concerning the physical universe, communication and the nature of other people and animals. The longer a child spends watching television in these formative, plastic, impressionable first years the less chance it has to develop any such understanding. And that applies even to the most child-friendly videos and CBeebies. Even without exposure to violence and sexuality, even assuming a censoring, “careful”, home, there is damage.

TV has its merits, but it does not respond. It does not correct your mistaken impressions, it does not hug you, or move around the room, clown in response to your clowning or lead you to the window to look at a rainbow or a pigeon. All it does is follow its own agenda, grinding mechanically through its tricks without any reference to your personality or your response. It does not know you are there. Yet it is, with its flickering and its colour, hypnotically fascinating: it physically holds your attention for longer than you really want to bestow it.

Those too young to understand its limitations should have it rationed, by adults. TV for an under-five should be one of many activities in the day, shared and discussed. A child watching a programme with an adult or an older sibling is having a fairly social, instructive experience. A child alone with a screen is not. Yet, because small children hunger and thirst after knowledge, that child will be concentrating, taking cues from what it sees and irrationally hoping for a response. The response will not come: after a while, the child stops hoping. The screen may be a poor babysitter, but it is an influential one. It teaches you that life is a spectator sport, and that you as an individual don’t matter. This is not a good start.

We are afraid to say this. In homes without gardens or space, in an age when the simple domestic tasks of yesterday are over more quickly (and the safety culture means we are afraid to share them with children anyway in case they cut or burn themselves) we have let the television fill the vacuum. Certainly, nobody has had the bottle to offer new parents a TV health warning, as government does about carbon monoxide or passive smoking. Before 1957, in its innocent beginnings, television actually closed down every day between 6 and 7pm for the “toddlers’ truce”, a crafty attempt to fool children into thinking it was everybody’s bedtime. It couldn’t happen now. The TV industry is all-powerful, and advertising and spin-off merchandising directed at children is big business.

Just imagine the impact of a public service commercial during peak viewing times, showing a small child and a screen and saying “An hour’s telly a day is more than enough for under-fives. They need real life”. A torrent of contumely would fall on the advertisement’s makers, accusing them of Luddism, social snobbery and unrealistic expectations. Social work orthodoxy, indeed, prescribes the opposite: a friend planning to adopt was censoriously asked by the case worker why she had no TV (it was in a cupboard). It was made clear that telly was essential for a child to participate in the “culture”. No parallel question was asked about the dangers of viewing too much, even though her prospective adoptees were infants. Another question was about family meals: again, it was made clear that eating at table rather than in front of TV was a middle-class value, hence a black mark.

The “culture” is all very well. Adults, even teenagers, are welcome to slump in front of Pop Idol and go to hell in a handcart if they want. We are fully formed people; we can make the return journey from that passive limbo. But under-fives are more vulnerable. If, in those first few years, a child can’t lay down a basic template of social interaction, spoken communication and playful partnership, it is a lasting handicap. We shouldn’t tolerate it, any more than we would tolerate sending them up chimneys. Indeed, neurologically and socially it was probably better to be a slum child playing in a grubby gutter with a soap-box cart and a roughneck sibling, than to be a well-fed, clean-clothed, dull-eyed TV slave six hours a day. A child in a carpet factory in the Third World is learning more effectively than a Western toddler alone for hours with a screen.

As Mr Bell reminded us, great difficulties face teachers who are expected to soothe, secure and socialise children who have lost months and years of development. But if teachers don’t, these are the children who alienate their peers, can’t concentrate, fail tests, grow ever more resentful and fall prey to deeper evils. It is a serious issue. Margaret Hodge, the Minister for Children, is currently making excellent noises about parents taking responsibility. It would be interesting to know her views on this insidious, almost universal manifestation of child neglect.