elevision may be a sort of mental candy fostering an addiction that leaves a child restless when the available stimulation is unsatisfying. Or the causal mechanism may be more fundamental, having to do with the development of brain function and structure.
3. TV-viewing disrupts sleep. Several studies confirm this generalization (8). Video games may be worse in this respect than television (9). Lack of good sleep must surely be detrimental to learning.
4. TV-viewing blocks retention of academic knowledge and skills. Although research has not yet addressed this issue, it seems likely that an evening of exciting television after a day in school will make the day's learning harder to recall. We may theorize that the brain organizes memory so that the most important things are most accessible, and that it attaches the most importance to whatever is most arresting and absorbing.
5. Television has an especially adverse effect upon the acquisition of language skills. The effect is probably mediated in at least five ways
- Television hinders language learning by reducing the child to a strictly passive role. Instead of engaging in conversation, a child in front of a television merely listens to somebody else talk. As a result, long hours before a television deprive a child of two kinds of experience essential to the development of language skill. First, the child has little opportunity to practice speaking. Second, in the absence of an adult responder, he receives no helpful feedback to his speech. Adults shape, correct, guide, and prompt a child's speech in ways that increase his ability to communicate effectively. By their choice of words, they also stretch a child's vocabulary. Video entertainment has no comparable value.
- A recent study shows that the effect of a child watching television or simply hearing it in the background is to greatly reduce his own vocalizations as well as his language interaction with adults. For each hour so spent, his vocalizations diminish 25-50% and the number of adult words he hears diminishes 75% (10).
- For a little child especially, television is like another adult in his life. But what the television says is completely irrelevant to the child's immediate world. Moreover, the television never responds appropriately to anything the child says. Being reared in front of a television is much like being reared by a schizophrenic mother.
- Much of television language is disjointed. No more than a few words are expended on any idea, and the main idea is rapidly changing, especially in a series of commercials. Thus, television language lacks the connectedness and extended development characteristic of so-called "linear thought." Linear thought employs logical or relational sequencing (relational sequencing is an order based on time, spatial location, or any relational dimension). It is the backbone of storytelling, persuasive argument, pedagogy, and every form of reasoning. To build a capacity for linear thought, children need to hear intelligent adult conversation. They also need to hear and read stories. Informational books and even informational videos, if they are tightly and logically constructed, are useful as well. Another tool for stretching a child's mental prowess is a sermon or Bible lesson. But television promotes a wholly different kind of thought, which might be called kaleidoscopic—thought consisting of a staccato flow of largely unrelated ideas based on momentary impressions and impulses. This kind of thinking cannot address any serious intellectual task. So, a child of television is severely handicapped.
- Because television is aimed at an audience filled with children and new speakers of English, the language it uses is exceedingly simple. Television English is always several notches below the English of educated adults. Hence, a child who has heard little else is ill-prepared to perform at a high level of language competence.
- As noted earlier, TV-viewing diminishes time devoted to reading.
6. There is mounting evidence that regular TV-viewing during the early years of life actual