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What "Just Being a Kid" Means Today
The Sedentary Life of Children
By Rae Pica
On the other hand, Robert Sachs, president of National Cable Television, contends that denying children TV is no more likely to encourage them to enjoy other activities, like reading, than denying them ice cream would encourage them to like Brussels sprouts. What Mr. Sachs fails to consider, however, is that if there were no television to fall back on, children would have to find something else to do! We did, didn't we?
Sadly, these days, that "something else" could well involve something else electronic. One study reports that children spend approximately 33 hours a week being electronically entertained (including but not exclusive to television) – an average of nearly five hours a day. Another, in 1999, found that children spend an average of six hours and 32 minutes a day with various media combined! It's unlikely the situation has improved since then.
Video games, once almost exclusively the entertainment of adolescents, have become popular fare for preschoolers as well. And the trend is growing. It seems everyone from Sesame Street (Elmo alone had at least four at last count) to the Teletubbies to Blue's Clues is marketing video games for preschoolers. And just try to lure the little ones away from them once they've gotten hooked!
Then, of course, there are the computers. Without a doubt, computers are an invention most of us can no longer imagine living without. But there's a great deal of controversy regarding the age at which children really need to begin using them.
Alison Armstrong and Charles Casement, authors of The Child and the Machine: How Computers Put Our Children's Education at Risk (Robins Lane Press, 2000), tell us computers and television have more in common than is generally acknowledged.
