I've watched a lot of TV in my life. In fact, some of my earliest memories revolve around the tube. In one mental snapshot, albeit one that's rather faint, I'm not even three years old. My mother is at church choir practice. My father, sister and I are watching The Donna Reed Show on a small black and white set in our small apartment on Grimes Hill in Staten Island. A similar image captures a moment that occurred perhaps three or four years later, after we'd moved into the house in which I grew up: Although it's past my bedtime—past 8:30—I can't sleep, so I wander into the living room where my parents are watching The Andy Griffith Show and ask if I can watch too.
There's a good reason these images stick in my mind: There was something profoundly comforting about television, especially these shows, with their idealized vision of small-town America, a nation of community and family, where emotions never ran high (was everyone on Prozac?) and where problems were trivial and easily solved. With this knowledge buried in my subconscious early on, I sought the comfort of TV year after year. I found it in reruns—of the aforementioned programs, not to mention my favorite, The Adventures of Superman—and of new shows that came and went as I grew up, ventured off to college and began to make my way in the world: Dick Van Dyke, Gunsmoke, Get Smart, The Man From U.N.C.L.E, All in the Family, Mary Tyler Moore. Lou Grant, Cheers, St. Elsewhere, Bob Newhart, L.A. Law, My So Called Life, Paradise, E.R., Friends, Seinfeld, American Dreams. Along the way, I also discovered more reruns of shows I was too young to watch in primetime—The Honeymooners, in particular. And the habit continues to this day. I've found solace in the Sunday night ritual of watching The Sopranos and more recently Entourage, and in that indispensable weeknight touchstone, The Daily Show. Occasionally, I still watch reruns of Andy Griffith.
In this respect, I have much in common with the vast majority of American Baby Boomers but differ considerably from many of my more literate friends—men and women who watched very little television when they were children and take in even less as adults. I have mixed feelings when I talk to these folks. On the one hand, I often think that I would have been better off if my parents had restricted my viewing or banned TV altogether. On the other hand, it seems to me that I've derived certain benefits from it.
In any event, old habits die hard and are usually passed on to one's offspring. That's certainly the case in my household. Like me, my children have grown up with a steady diet of television. My daughter has always favored sitcoms and melodramas—7th Heaven (which I found to be utterly abysmal) and The Gilmore Girls, which grew on me. My son, shortly after leaving the Blue's Clues stage, became a fan of The Simpsons and subsequently Family Guy. Both shows, I insist (with tongue only slightly in cheek) fall into the category of educational television. After all, the writing is consistently excellent, and it's clear that the programs have helped cultivate in my son a sophisticated sense of humor and an understanding that American culture is, in many ways, a carnival of absurdities. By contrast, I'm thoroughly convinced that so-called wholesome fare like 7th Heaven—with its insipid storylines—has the potential to induce brain rot. If it comes down to a choice between a little profanity on the one hand and bad writing on the other, I'll expose my kids to the former any day.
On this point, of course, I differ from most parents I know.
The conventional wisdom is that the pervasiveness of sex, violence and profanity on television is largely responsible for undermining the moral foundation of our nation's youth.
I just don't buy it. The problem is not exposure to any particular content, per se, whether on television, in film, on the internet, or in conversation. The problem is that far too many children are not being raised to think about the things they're reading, watching, hearing and encountering in everyday life.
I've tried to keep this in mind in raising my own kids. As far as I'm concerned, they can pretty much watch whatever they want. If they hear utterances of profanity or catch glimpses of nudity on HBO, the experience is not going to traumatize them for life—not nearly so much, in any event, as having to eat the food in the school cafeteria, being forced to take SOL exams or seeing Dick Cheney on the nightly news.
Countering such influences (the gutter language and the more serious threats to their moral fiber, like The 700 Club) requires a twofold effort. First, it's important to bear in mind that it's not about content so much as it is about quantity. The late, great cultural critic Neil Postman argued in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death that programs like Sesame Street are more insidious than inane sitcoms because they establish in children's minds the expectation that education must be entertaining. I'm not sure I buy his thesis entirely, but he has a point. Too much TV—any TV—erodes our ability to think because it's made up of random images and soundbites designed either to pacify us or stimulate in us the desire for more stuff. With my own kids, in other words, I'm far more concerned about limiting the amount of time they spend in front of the television than I am about screening whatever it is they're watching.
The other important ingredient in all this, it seems to me, is context. What else is happening in their lives? Are kids growing up surrounded by books, music, art and intelligent conversation? More important, are they are invited to enter into conversation, not as a forced civics lesson but as a free-flowing exploration of ideas, humor and delight in the world?
The people I know who were raised in such an environment are not only fine but generally more conservative in some respects than their peers who've been shielded from “profane” influences. The problem with people who obsess about the potential damage to children's psyches from Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction is that they miss the bigger picture. In the end, a child's development is warped not so much by the few bad things to which he is exposed as it is by deprivation. Expose a child to television and film and music and art and natural landscapes and cities and religious experiences and people from all walks of life; teach them to think and trust their hearts and dream big dreams, and the passing images of gratuitous sex and violence on television will become insignificant. They'll simply lose interest in such things.
No, the problem lies not with the purveyors of cheap entertainment. The problem lies with our small-minded school administrators and our politicians who shamelessly seize upon scapegoats instead of setting forth a vision for society. And of course, ultimately, it lies with us—we, who could expose our children to the great abundance of our cultural heritage, with all of its profane beauty and sacred ambiguities, but who, instead, seek protect them these things.
In the end it boils down to this: We can try to shield them, or we can give them the emotional, intellectual and spiritual tools with which to reshape the culture in their own, more hopeful and excellent image. To my mind, there's no question which is the wiser path.
—Tom Robotham