Is America Addicted to Television?
Has our love affair with TV gone too far? Consider the research and see how your family compares.
Articles within this series
- Overview
- Is America Addicted to Television?
- What Happens When TV Ratings Are Wrong?
- Directing TV's Role in Your Home
- Tykes and TV
- TV and Your Child's Ability to Think and Learn
- Beyond Aggression: How TV Violence Can Affect Your Child
- How TV Affects Your Child's Diet and Weight
- Is Televised Poker Helping Raise a Generation of Gamblers?
- Next Steps / Related Information
When a cross-country truck driver wrote the TV Turn-off Network in Washington, DC, he reminisced about his childhood, which wasn’t spent in front of what my mother calls, “The Boob Tube.”
“I grew up on a farm, and we never had TV. I raised my son without a lot of TV. We played games, cards, read books, went roller skating, biking and worked in the garden. Hello, America! There is life without television. There are so many other things to do.”
This man is in the minority. Why? Because research shows that the average American watches 4 hours and 35 minutes of television per day.1 Additionally, 82 percent of households have more than one television at home.2 In fact, 30 percent of kids say they watch TV in their bedroom.3 That means there’s a whole lot of watching going on and families aren’t doing it together.
T.S. Eliot once said, “The remarkable thing about television is that it permits several million people to laugh at the same joke and still feel lonely.” What happened to togetherness? What happened to roller skating, reading and playing cards? It seems that America is addicted to television and it’s one of the cultural culprits destroying communication within the family.
Nielsen Media Research reports that people watch television more than any other activity. Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, even lists things to do that will help if you think you might be addicted to what author Marie Winn calls, “The Plug in Drug.”
Other statistics support America’s television addiction:
- A television set is turned on for more than a third of the day — eight hours, 14 minutes, in the average American household.4
- America’s 15.9 million children aged 2 to 5 watched an average of 3 hours and 40 minutes of television a day during the 2004-2005 TV season.5
- The typical American home received 104 television channels in 2006.6
Are you getting the picture? Television rules. It has its own special place usually in the center of the living room like a little god. It gets more attention than any family member and everyone is paying for it, especially children.
Some parents complain that they don’t have enough time in their day to work, shop, clean, take care of their spouse, spend time in social activities and with their families. In an address to the National Press Club, William Bennett said, “The two statistics I am trying to get together are the one that says the average American adult has very little time to spend with his family … [and the one] that tells us the average American adult watches 21 hours of television a week. Now that seems to me that if it’s easy as that, we can just … turn off the TV … and check the homework or something.”
It’s not only parent-child relationships that are being negatively affected; children also aren’t connecting in person with each other. Between iPods, cell phones, and television, we’re dancing a dance of isolation.
Beth Lubozhiski, a 7th grader from Minneapolis, MN was happy when her family participated in a week without TV. “When my brother isn't watching TV all the time," Beth explained, "he's a lot more fun to be around. We actually hung out together and just talked, something we had not done in a long time.”
Talking. That’s a great idea. The art of story telling is being lost in our society, but is still an important way for people to connect. When a parent tells a child a story, it builds a relationship, and when a child shares a story or something about their life with their parent, it builds trust — it builds families.
So if you find after reading these statistics that your family might have a television addiction, do what Beth did with her family and turn-off your TV. Or you can do what my friend Dave did: Take your TV to the garage and place it next to the trash can. Then your family can start talking to each other. Just begin with a story.
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