Christmas telly tyrants
Calvin posted this on Jan 3rd 2008 under Children, Evening Echo Column, Parenting, Rant, Writing
Published in the WOW! supplement of the Evening Echo 02/01/2008
If someone was to mention “the greatest unacknowledged health threat of our time” to you, what would you suppose they were talking about?
Could it be aids perhaps – that insidious menace that still haunts mankind, despite seemingly dropping beneath the media’s radar – or could it be the rise of that un-killable killer, the MRSA bug? Perhaps it’s the deadly ebola virus and the lethal haemorrhagic fever it instigates, or could it be a human strain of bird flue? Or maybe, just maybe, it’s the way the HSE is administering the Irish health system….
The answer, apparently, is none of the above. It is television!
That’s right television – or more specifically, letting children watch too much television. The quote is the utterance of Dr Aric Stigman, an associate fellow of the British Psychological Society, who is apparently the author of a book on the subject. Children today, says Dr Stigman, are watching television for extended periods at critical stages of the brain’s development. Television, he maintains is an isolating medium, and children are spending years looking at a screen instead of socialising with their peers.
