No Tuning Out TV's Negative Effects

The Boston Herald

They don't watch TV. Their parents won't let them. The babies listen to music, show tunes and kids tunes instead. Except once in a while both children have been seen perched on their fathers' laps mesmerized by the Red Sox. But that's been it. A few innings of baseball. A few hours of Baby Einstein. And the rest of the time the TV has been off. 

And it's paid off. 

Adam turned 1 this month and Lucy is almost 2. They are the blank slates upon which the world writes. You wonder how much is indelible. You wonder how much children this age pick up from television? How sarcasm and dress and attitude and blood and violence and screaming and bad language and even the nightly news affects them? You think it's hype, all the studies that blame TV for children's aggression, and that most of what children see and hear rolls off them. That they can't possibly be absorbing all that we absorb.

And then you see for yourself what television can do.

We bought the video ``Signing Time'' and let the babies watch TV for the first time. Signing is big these days. The thinking is that if children who can't talk yet learn to sign - if they can make their needs known by signing ``hungry'' and ``sad'' and ``happy'' - they will be less frustrated, have fewer meltdowns and shed fewer tears.

Adam likes the video, but he likes his building blocks better. While he's into the song, ``It's Signing Time with Alex and Leah,'' Lucy is into the whole thing. You wonder how much children learn from TV? Lucy started signing ``fish'' the first day.

I watch the two of them as they watch TV. I watch their hands. I watch them imitating. ``Do you want more Cheerios?'' we ask. And Lucy taps the tips of her fingers together, the sign for more.

So many studies have said the same thing - that violence on television is more closely associated with aggressive behavior than poverty, race or even parental behavior. That TV and movies mess up our children's minds.

On Wednesday, President Bush signed legislation that gives legal protection to companies trying to clean up movies for children. The Family Entertainment and Copyright Act will allow parents to buy DVDs that can be programmed to skip over violence and mute obscenities. But muting a few words and skipping over violence, however well intentioned, is hardly a solution to a problem that is an infestation.

A 1973 study in Canada shows what we're up against. Researchers from the University of British Columbia compared the levels of aggression in children from three Canadian towns, two towns with access to TV and one, due to a mountain range, with no access. They studied the towns twice - before TV came to the third town, then two years after TV came. The results? Before TV, the kids in the isolated town were gentler. After? Hitting, biting and shoving had increased 160 percent.