Writing for life

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.

It seems that he has a point. A growing body of international research suggests that television can have a seriously detrimental effects on the health and development of young children. One recent study showed that children who watch as little as two hours of television a day show clear signs of bad behaviour, are less socially adept and exhibited disrupted sleep patterns. The study also found that almost half the children surveyed have a television set in their bedroom by the age of five. Other estimates suggest that, in Britain at least, up to half of all three-year-olds have a television in their bedroom – a notion that I find quite difficult to grasp. It’s one thing letting your youngster watch a bit of “Balamorey” and “Bear in the Big Blue House” of a morning – but putting a TV into their bedroom? That’s just asking for trouble!

This, of course, is the wrong time of year for worrying about how much television anyone is watching. I think all of us have square eyes after the holidays. Go on, admit it – you’ve been glued to the box too, watching all the old favourites. Rationing access to the TV remote over Christmas would be about as much use as trying to go on a diet.

Now though, the holiday season is over. Time to stop wallowing in excess and cut things back to more moderate levels of consumption. That of course includes television.

While the girls were happy to embrace the extra telly over Christmas, I don’t think they’re in any danger of becoming either telly addicts or social misfits any time soon. As for the bad behaviour… well, experience demonstrates that they’re quite capable of achieving that without any television at all.

Yes, the research might well point to the fact that excessive amounts of television – and perhaps even relatively little – can damage a child’s healthy development, but it’s not the television that’s doing the damage… it’s parental neglect. That, at the end of the day, is where the buck stops.

I’m not standing on any pedestals here… there are plenty of times when I’ve called on the good ol’ four-cornered-babysitter to get me out of a tight spot. It’s wonderful for keeping the gang quiet for an hour or two. The trouble starts when we routinely rely on television to play the surrogate parent, and stop giving our children enough attention.

As for putting a television set into your 3-year-old’s bedroom… that just beggars belief.