It ain’t rocket science

‘I’ve often thought it’d be great to have just a fraction of the money that goes to funding studies that state the obvious. For example, there’s a new study (in addition to previous studies) that finds it’s not such a great idea for children to have televisions in their bedrooms.

Not having children myself, I try to restrain myself and talk to parents to make sure that I’m not completely off base before commenting. The resounding response to cases like this study is “who’s the parent?” Parents seem to be abdicating their roles.

One of the doctors in the study, Dr. Epstein said “In our experience, it is often hard for parents to remove a television set from a child’s bedroom.” As one mother of four quipped to me, “Well it’s hard to make kids go to bed, too, or brush their teeth properly, or do their homework for that matter.”

Parents don’t have an easy job, but experience has consistently shown that it only gets harder when they don’t do their job as parents. If we can’t take a TV out of a six year-old’s room, what makes us think that she’ll respect curfew when she’s 16?

If you can be mildly amused without getting upset, here’s an article on the study. The best line in the article has to be: “”Why a bedroom television appears to have such a pronounced impact is unclear.” Hmmm, the child has no incentive to move beyond his bed and can watch whatever he wants whenever he wants – there’s no way a parent can adequately monitor something that is out of sight like a television in a bedroom – and he is constantly being bombarded with the fare that is called television programming. In other words, they are completely receptive/succeptible to all the advertising, not to mention the content of the programs. How can we be surprised that these children will be heavier, less active, and not do as well in school?

Then, there are other issues, too. Like computers, televisions need to be in public areas in the home and they need to be monitored by the parents. Otherwise, we shouldn’t be surprised when children start to learn bad behavior or develop addictions, e.g. pornography.