Reclaiming The Next Generation

Reclaiming The Next Generation:
Turn Off The TV, Shut Down The Computer and Talk To Your Children

Sam Goldstein, Ph.D.
This is a SamGoldstein.com Monthly Article - April, 2003
Copyright ? 2003 Dr. Sam Goldstein - All Rights Reserved

Last month I came across a short piece in the news media indicating that based upon parental report during the year 2000, children between the ages of two and seventeen years spent 382 minutes daily with media. That is nearly six and a half hours per day! I can’t say that I was surprised, but I wanted to know more, including how this statistic broke down into various forms of media. I found my answer in a report from the Annenburg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania titled The Fifth Annual Survey of Parents and Children, Media in the Home. The authors, Dr. Emory Woodward and Ms. Natalia Gridina report that for the fourth consecutive year television was the medium with which children spent the most time. According to parents of children between the ages of two and seventeen, children spent nearly two and a half hours or 147 minutes with television each day. The 382 total minutes also included other forms of mediated communication, including playing video games, using a computer, talking on the telephone, browsing on the internet, reading a book, magazine or newspaper. Further, children were reported to engage in these media simultaneously. For example, reading when watching television or using the computer while talking on the phone. In terms of time spent in front of screens, children reportedly spent over four and a half hours or 281 minutes watching television or video tapes, playing video games, using the computer or browsing on the internet each day. This was reported to be an increase of twenty-one minutes from the previous year.

According to the most current U.S. Census Bureau report of January, 2001, there are approximately seventy-seven million children between the ages of two and seventeen years in the United States. By my calculations, in the year 2000 children spent 361 million hours in front of screens, 188 million hours watching television, 40 million hours playing video games and 40 million hours on the computer! There is no reason to suspect that these numbers have reduced in the years 2001 and 2002. Children from families with lower incomes spent more time in front of screens, particularly watching television and playing video games than other children. Children of heavy television viewing parents (more than two hours a day) themselves spent significantly more time watching television and video tapes, surfing the web and playing video games than children of parents who watched less television. Further, the media appeared to serve as a babysitter of sorts. Children with two parents working full time outside of the home spent an average of forty-three minutes more with all media than children in families in which one parent did not work full time outside of the home. Children of single parents spent forty-seven minutes more with all media each day than children where there was more than one adult caretaker available in the home. Boys spent more time watching television while girls spent significantly more time reading books and talking on the telephone. Interestingly there were no significant gender differences in internet or computer use.

The media in turn has responded to children’s behavior and perhaps fostered it as well. The advertising industry is reported to spend twelve billion dollars a year marketing directly to children. Children view advertisements nearly everywhere from magazines and television to the internet and even in their classrooms. Some estimates suggest that children view 40,000 commercials a year. Further, the younger the child the more they are likely to believe what they hear, see and read.

By the late 1990's, hundreds of thousands of children were hurt or being hurt. Millions more were struggling. Poverty rates were up. SAT scores were down. Teen suicide rates have been reported to have doubled since the 1970's, although child homicide rates have declined lately. Nonetheless, they are more than quadruple from the mid-1980's. A 1990 National Commission on the Roles of School and Community in Improving Adolescent Health pointed out that never before had one generation of American children been less healthy, less cared for or less prepared for life than their parents were at the same age. To complicate matters further, there doesn’t appear to be a particular country or place that is equally protective of children. Poverty rates and school drop out are much higher in the United States than in many European countries. Yet availability to health care for children is better in the United States. A child is twenty times, however, more likely to be killed in New York than in Paris, France or Bonn, Germany and seventy times more likely to be killed in Dallas than in Tokyo.

Authors Sylvia Hewlett and Cornell West in their book, The War Against Parents (Houghton-Mifflin, 1998) suggest that there has been an enormous erosion of the parenting role. Parents are increasingly unable to look after their children. Parents once portrayed almost too ideally in the media through television sitcoms such as The Donna Reed Show and Leave It to Beaver, in the current media are viewed as dysfunctional or in many programs, absent. Authors Steven Farkas and Jean Johnson in their report, Kids These Days: What Americans Really Think About the Next Generation, suggest that two thirds of Americans view teenagers as rude, irresponsible and wild. Interestingly, they place the blame squarely on the shoulders of parents. They suggest children are out of control because parents are failing at their job.

More children with seemingly more risks, more vulnerabilities and more problems; in a world in which current events over the past three years seem nearly unreal while the world appears to border on the brink of global conflict. It is not easy raising children in these times. It is even more complex, both of these sets of authors point out, as parenting appears to be a “dying art.” Parents are not supported or provided with community resources such as availability to mental health services for themselves and their children, educational support and the time they need to produce children as Dr. Bob Brooks and I have pointed out, with strong resilient mindsets capable of successfully handling the stress and adversity that is likely to come their way.

It is more important now than ever for parents to re-claim their role. It is more important now than ever to make time for children and create an atmosphere in which they can and must develop the skills necessary to deal with this world. I suggest you begin simply. Limit television time. Limit screen time. Play a direct role in helping your children choose their toys and games. Don’t be bullied or goaded into allowing your children to “grow up before their time” by exposing them to media that is beyond their intellectual and emotional capabilities. If we stop allowing our children to buy games with violent themes, the game makers will make other games. Make an effort to spend time with your children each day. Watch them play. Take a more active role in their daily lives.

No one knows what the future brings but our job as parents, as a community, and as a society, is to prepare children for the future, their future. For if we fail, regardless of current events or other stresses in the world, we as a species have no future. Children come into this world with their own unique temperaments. Qualities within children, qualities between children and their environments, as well as the characteristics of the world around them all play a role in shaping their personality, stress hardiness and resilience. We must refocus our efforts on those stress inoculating factors between children and parents, between children and teachers, between children and the world around them. Parents, caregivers and educators can strongly influence whether children develop the characteristics and mindset associated with resilience or whether they become burdened by low self-worth, self-doubt and a diminished sense of hope. Developing a resilient mindset for each child is not a luxury but as Dr. Brooks and I have written, an essential component for our children, our culture and our future.