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This article says that Sesame Street has partnered with a well-known and respected advocacy group to make a series of videos designed for babies (not toddlers) that will be watched with the parents. The controversy is that some experts feel babies shouldn't be watching any television. At all. That children will be watching enough television in the future and they don't need to start so soon.
This thread is designed to look at the big picture, as well as this article. Is this a symptom of a television-obsessed culture, or a cause of a television-obsessed populace? Will this create more obsese children who spend more of their time watching tv than breathing fresh air?
(Children who are obsese in the States in 2000:
- Ages 2 to 5 - Boys 9.9%, Girls 11%
- Ages 6 to 11 - Boys 16%, Girls 14.5%
- Ages 12 to 19 - Boys 15.5%, Girls 15.5%
Abstract for study, found on Wikipedia. To be fair, I'm not saying television is the cause of obesity. What I'm saying is that a sedentary lifestyle (one where TV and video games play a large part) is one factor for obesity.)
US children watch an average of 25 hours of TV per week, found here. Scientic American says that television addiction is like any other addiction. Doing a Google Search on TV and violence leads to a number of sites saying that watching violence on TV can potentially lead to aggressive and possibly violent behaviour IRL (this is up for debate, though)
The good news is that educational programming in the early years lead to better pre-reading skills test results in the future, according to this, while children who watch non-educational do poorer. It also shows that reading is a skill that must be developed and watching tv generally takes away from that time.
The good news is that Sesame Street often works with education systems and experts in order to achieve a higher educational content and efficiency. We can expect that Sesame Street's videos for babies will be educational and probably have a positive effect on the babies.
But wait. Have you seen the Elmo's World segment on Sesame Street? It's a little skit in which Elmo lives in a CGI crayon-styled world with a goldfish. It's aimed at the younger portion of Sesame's audience. There was some controversy over that because Elmo was teaching some erroneous facts that were considered charming because of Elmo's innocence. I need a citation or a link for this. Will return.
So what do you think? Should babies be watching television? Does it matter? |
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