Column: TV & the ‘Virtual Childhood’

Hope for kids on a TV diet

By Ted Pease
©1996

There’s more to life in the information age than a TV diet of Twinkies and Nutrasweet. So says Hope Green, vice-chairman of the national board of directors of the Public Broadcasting Service.

When she appeared at Utah State University last week to talk about “The ‘Virtual Childhood’—Growing Kids on a Television Diet,” Green could have lambasted TV as the symbol of the end of civilization. Or, as president of the PBS system in Vermont and a national leader of public broadcasting, she could have stalwartly defended TV as a misunderstood and maligned educational tool.

Instead, she did neither, and both. Her reasonable moderation may have sent away unfulfilled both those who wanted the demon tube soundly whipped, and others seeking reassurance that there’s hope for their kids who watch TV six hours a day. Because parents and educators who want to blame social woes on television, as well as those who would like to grasp at educational TV as the answer to their kids’ problems all are bound for disappointment.

Anyone who watches even a little bit of television knows that at least a portion—perhaps entire continents—of the TV world is a “vast wasteland,” as former FCC chief Newton Minow put it in 1961. Just five years ago, Minow revisited the “wasteland,” and said TV—and the rest of us, too—still fails in at least four areas.

“We have failed 1.) to use television for education; 2.) to use television for children; 3.) to finance public television properly; and 4.) to use television properly in political campaigns,” he said.

And it is such a waste of potential, because television could be “the most important educational institution in America,” Minow said. “More people learn more each day, each year, each lifetime from television than from any other source. All of television is education; the question is, what are we teaching and what are we learning?”

Hope Green’s answer to that might be that the responsibility lies with how we use TV, and how we let our kids use it, whether kids watch 10 hours a week or 40, and whether TV is an activity that parents and children share. The Vermont broadcast executive, who has only one TV set in her house (and it’s on the third floor), preaches and practices moderation.

There is another, perhaps more comforting answer to the dilemma of how to grow kids on a television diet and in a mass media world, and it comes from two teams of researchers at the universities of Massachusetts and Kansas.

In the early 1980s, the researchers studied kids aged 2 to 7 in Springfield, Mass., and Topeka, Kan. The concern was (and still is) that a lot of TV watching, even of educational programs like “Sesame Street,” would impair children’s learning ability in at least two ways: 1.) because it is a visual medium, TV would slow down kids’ language development and reading/writing skills; and 2.) because TV is so active and busy, it might reduce kids’ ability to concentrate and pay attention in school.

In 1994, the researchers—led by Daniel Anderson at UMass and Aletha Huston and John Wright at Kansas—hunted down 570 of the kids from the earlier study, who were by then in high school, to see how they turned out. The question was whether those who had been heavy TV viewers as kids had become vegetables in the classroom.

Parents of kids who watch a lot of shows like “Sesame Street” will like the results. Instead of contributing to a generation of poor learners and uninterested readers, the study found exactly the opposite among the high school students who had watched “Sesame Street” and other educational shows as kids.

“Viewing educational television in preschool appears to contribute to children’s academic performance many years later,” the researchers found after interviewing the students and examining their high school transcripts. They also talked to parents and teachers, and evaluated the students’ “academic self-concept” and how much they valued learning.

“It is obvious that the content learned at age 5 cannot influence high school performance directly,” they said. “Instead, a rich diet of educational television may help children to enter school with the academic skills required for the tasks they encounter, increasing the likelihood of early success.”

“This early positive experience in school may set a child on a trajectory of success, self-confidence, and positive reputation among teachers that has long-term consequences for later academic achievement.”

It turns out that kids who watched “Sesame Street” or other educational programs five hours a week (once a day) when they were 5, performed an average of a one-quarter grade better in high school than kids who didn’t grow up on “Sesame Street.”

Of course, none of this gives parents a license to plunk their kids down in front of the tube and use it as a baby-sitter—kids who watch five or six hours a day, which is one reported national average, probably aren’t doing much or anything else, and most of that is probably not “Sesame Street,” “Nova” or the Discovery Channel anyway.

That’s where Hope Green’s moderation message comes in: Twinkies won’t kill you, unless that’s all you eat. Neither will TV ruin our kids’ lives and turn their little brains into mush, unless that’s all they do with their childhoods.

• Ted Pease is head of the Department of Communication at Utah State University and co-editor of the 1996 book Children and the Media. This column ran in the Logan (Utah) Herald-Journal on Nov. 24, 1996.