TV and Today's Family
Article Overview
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
A lot has changed since the first television sets were developed in the 1920s. The wobbly 24-line picture screens produced by early technology have evolved into today's high-definition TVs with nearly flawless picture quality. And there's never been more programming options available. The average home now receives more than 100 channels thanks to cable and satellite receivers.
But what has our love affair with TV left us with?
This series of articles is presented to inform you about key issues, while helping you manage your family's TV-viewing habits in a healthy way. Here's just some of what you'll discover:
- How many hours a day the TV is on in the average American household
- Why you may not be able to rely on TV ratings as an accurate indicator of a program's content
- What you can do to balance TV viewing time and its influence in your home
- Why children shouldn't watch TV at all until they are at least 2 years old
- What product categories kids are most often hit with in the 40,000 ads they each see a year
- How many acts of violence typical children see on TV by age 18 and how it can affect them
- Why televised poker is a bad bet, especially for young people