TV OR NOT TV

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Anon, to sudden silence won, In fancy they pursue The dream-child moving through a land Of wonders wild and new, In friendly chat with bird or beast-- And half believe it true. --Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

The children pad down the stairs on Saturday morning, and after a quick breakfast they're beckoned to an adjacent room by a blank TV screen. Taken in hand by the remote control, they are led through a world populated by Power Rangers, Animaniacs, the Cryptkeeper, Cap'n Crunch, Hulk Hogan, the Incredible Hulk, the Mighty Ducks, Rugrats, Spider-Man, Superman, Pinky and the Brain, Barbie, Nightmare Ned, The Undertaker ...

Not even sensible and indomitable Alice could have stood up to all the characters that inhabit Saturday-morning television, which accounts for just a few of the 28 hours the average American child spends in front of the tube every week. Wonderland? Children's programming is more like the quintessential "wasteland" denounced by former fcc chairman Newton Minow, a land in which young viewers are pursued--and often captured--by cartoons and cartoonish people sponsored by companies trying to entice the kids into buying their candies and sweetened cereals and toys.

We worry about them when they wander into the world of adult television, with its sex and violence and sass. But in reality, prime time provides only about five violent acts an hour, while the Saturday-morning baby sitter offers children about 26 such acts an hour. Studies have shown that the more violence children watch, the more likely they are to act aggressively. A child watches more than 100,000 acts of violence on television before he or she is finished with elementary school, according to the American Psychological Association.

We're not the first generation of parents to be confronted by the potential dangers of television. But our parents didn't have to safeguard dozens of channels or computer video games or cute little frogs hawking Budweiser on a Website. Nowadays 66% of families watch television at mealtimes, 54% of children have a set in their bedroom and the average family has the TV on seven hours a day, or nearly half of a household's waking hours. Allison Smith, a substitute teacher in Houston with two daughters, 5 and 6, says, "I grew up in the Brady Bunch era, and my parents didn't worry about how much TV I watched, and I watched a lot. TV was just not an issue. Today there is so much sex and violence, you have to monitor what your kids watch. Kids are doing things today that were unheard of 20 years ago, and maybe TV is partly to blame."

Not all television is bad, of course. It can teach and inspire and get children off the couch. But more likely it will numb and mesmerize and keep them in a state of suspended animation. If you look closely in a child's eyes after a program, you may be able to detect the difference. There just might be a gleam after, say, Bill Nye the Science Guy, or a glaze after, say, Power Rangers Turbo. Children need help as they make their way through a looking glass that gets wider every day. Their parents need their own guides.