My wife and I do not own a television. We never had. Judging
by the reviews of this year’s TV season, so far, we’re not missing much.
However, our refusal not to purchase a television isn’t
really related to our dislike for what’s on television. My pet reason for not
having a television is that many scholars suspect that watching even a small
amount of television detracts from the ability to read well. Repeated exposure
to TV develops the synapses and neural pathways in the brain that decode
television; but this brain development seems strongly correlated to lack of
development in the reading center of the brain. For Christians, who are people
of the Word—undermining the ability to read well and deeply is a spiritual
issue.
Even Camille Paglia, a famous culture critic best known for
celebrating television’s role in the “repaganization of Western Culture,” understands
how television is dangerous in this respect. She writes that in the second
command God forbade the use of all images in heaven above and earth below
because God understood that such images create a powerful, spiritual urge to
ignore words. So Paglia calls for “the enlightened repression of our children,”
by which she means rigorous word-centered education to the exclusion of TV, if
we want our kids to become all they can be. Commenting on this insight, Neil
Postman said, “With the Second Commandment, Moses was the first person who ever
said, more or less, “Don’t watch TV; go do your homework.”
So what about your TV watching habits? I have a few
suggestions. First, inform yourself about the State of the discussion when it
comes to the benefits and risks of TV viewing, especially for children. I’d
recommend Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the
Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, and Mark Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age
Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future. In my book, Not Sure, you can find a long
bibliography on the relation of television to reading on page 42.
Second. Make reading together a family-time priority until
well after the kids are reading on their own, a lot, with pleasure. As an added
benefit, you’ll double and triple your cuddle time. My wife and I took turns
reading to our children for an hour a day until the oldest was well into high
school. That daily hour is easily one of our kids’ best memories of growing up.
Third. Don’t ever allow the television to play when a parent
isn’t watching along. Children of all ages need instruction and wisdom about
what they see on television because television mostly portrays a fanciful world
without God where greed, envy, and several more of the deadly sins carry the
day. That’s a very jaundiced view of how things really are; kids need another
perspective to interpret TV for them.
Finally, if you don’t have time or energy for the above—and
I take it that includes a lot of this blog's readers—I have one final
suggestion. It cuts through all the difficulties that go with having a
television. Get rid of it.
Our family fell into life without a television when I was in
seminary and couldn’t afford cable, much less the television itself. Somehow
that circumstance has become a blessing that continues to give and give. Over
the years we’ve avoided countless hours of uncommunicative stupefaction and had
discussions, reading, and lots of other fun activities instead.
The bottom line here is that all the time and energy it
takes to watch television responsibly may simply be out of reach for most of
us. On the other hand, all those extra hours without a television could provide
a rich, rich resource for raising kids in the way they should go. All for the
price of a trip to the trash can.
