THE MARK OF CURRENT
TECHNOLOGY UPON OUR CHILDREN –
LIFE WITHIN THE
MACHINE
A CranioSacral Approach - compiled by Michele
Wolhuter
RCST
If
you are over the age of 30, then you are one of the last generations to
experience your childhood without the influence of current media
technology. If you are American, then
you need to be over the age of about 50.
Your childhood was very different from your own children’s, and new
evidence is suggesting that your children’s cognitive abilities will not be as
complete, or advanced as yours are, even though they have the potential to rise
far above you in brain capability. This
is, in part, because of the influence and effect of media exposure on the
developing brain of the child.
Television
has been in existence for the past 80 years, although the broadcasting of
entertainment shows didn’t begin until the 1940’s. In 1950, 10% of American households owned a
TV set. By 1954 this percentage had
increased to 50%. Since 1970, more than
98% of American households own a TV and currently 66% of household own three or
more TVs.
Television
is on almost 7 hours per day in an average American home. A study sponsored by the Kaiser Family
Foundation and released in November 1999, revealed that most children between 2
and 18 years old are exposed to an average of 6 ½ hours of daily media
exposure, of which television is the most dominant. A child spends more time watching television
than any other activity except sleeping, and by age 18 a child has spent more
time in front of a TV than at school. 1
Today’s
youth have access to more media with more channels or outlets within each
medium, offering more content, more vividly than even the most ‘outlandish’
mid-century science fiction novels once predicted, and is creating a media
environment in which youth use these media largely independent of adult
supervision or comment.
Strangers in Our Homes – Some Points
to Ponder
There
are sixteen acts of violence per hour of children’s programming, only eight per
hour on adults. By the time our children
become teenagers, they have seen an estimated 18,000 violent murders on
television. Life is shown to be
expendable and cheap, yet we condemn them for acting violently. 2
An
extensive, fifteen year longitudinal study in the United States, Canada and
South Africa, showed long-term childhood exposure to TV as a causal factor
behind approximately one half of the homicides, rapes and assaults committed in
these countries. 3
Children
have an instinctive desire to imitate observed behavior without reasoning
whether it ought to be imitated or not.
They mimic anything, including destructive and anti-social
behaviors. Infants as young as 14 months
of age demonstrably observe and incorporate behaviors seen on TV. 4 From TV, our children learn that life is
violent, and people, including one’s self, are expendable. Remember that your four year old can not yet
properly differentiate between fact and fiction – what s/he views on television
is real.
Cartoon
violence is carefully and deliberately used to lure the child to watch, and to
attract the largest possible audience for the purpose of selling products. Violent cartoons have been found to be the
easiest means of attracting the entire 2 to 11 year age group. The most serious and devastating effect of
this marketing scheme is desensitization and the development of thick-skinned,
detached, cynical human beings. 5
After
the introduction of television in
More
than 3 000 studies over the past 30 years offer evidence that violent
programming has a measurable effect on young minds. 7
The Loss of Imagination
“Imagination
is more important than knowledge,
for while knowledge points to all there is,
imagination points to all there will be”
-
Einstein
All
of the above quoted examples are to do with the content of the programmes our
children are watching – far more damaging, and far more concerning, is the neurological
and developmental damage that the ‘act’ of watching television causes.
As
Joseph Chilton Pearce in his book Evolutions
End explains: television floods the
infant-child’s brain with images at the very time his or her brain is supposed
to learn to make images from within. On
the other hand, when a child is read a story (especially one with not many
pictures), s/he has to learn to form images (pictures) from within. With each new story read or told to the
child, the brain is challenged to enlarge the number of neural fields involved
to form new images. Television however,
can be assimilated by a single set of
neural fields – each time the television is put on, the same set of neural fields are activated. We habituate to television within a few
minutes of viewing, from the very first exposure on, since no creative response
is needed or can be made.
This
means, in effect, that all those thousands hours of television the average
child sees may as well have been all one program.
Marie
Winn in her book The Plug-In Drug
explains that as a child reads s/he creates pictures in his mind and uses
imagination and points of reference to put the story together. “Television images do not go through a
complex symbolic transformation. The
mind does not have to decode and manipulate during the television
experience. It may be that
television-bred children’s reduced opportunities to indulge in this ‘inner
picture-making’ accounts for the curious inability of so many children today to
adjust to non-visual experiences”.
Watching television and playing video games does not develop a child’s
skills in word recognition, decoding, vocabulary, spelling or high-level
thinking”. Watching television is a passive exercise, leaving no opportunity
for interaction, in fact, it has been characterized as multi-leveled sensory
deprivation that may be stunting the growth of our children’s brains.
Failing to develop
imagery means having no imagination. This is far more
tragic than not being able to daydream.
As Joseph Chilton Pearce sums up:
it means children who can’t “see” what the mathematical symbol or the
semantic words mean; nor the chemical formulae; nor the concept of civilization
as we know it. They can sense only what
is immediately bombarding their physical system and are restless and
ill-at-ease without such bombardment.
Because these children are sensory deprived they initiate stimulus
through constant movement or other such action.
These children become agitated when left to their own devices, unable to
entertain themselves or play. Bored
children are a modern day phenomena.
One
of the main problems with television is that children get used to not using
their imaginative thinking at all, and they don’t exercise the part of the
brain (the neocortex) that creates the pictures.
TV
rots the senses in the head!
It
kills the imagination dead!
It
clogs and clutters up the mind!
It
makes a child so dull and blind.
He can
no longer understand a fantasy,
A
fairyland!
His
brain becomes as soft as cheese!
His
powers of thinking rust and freeze!
-an
excerpt from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl, 1964
Television and The New Labels
My
biggest concern, states Joseph Chilton Pearce, is to do with the way the
television industry countered the hypnotic effect of watching television by
introducing what are known as “startle effects” into children’s
programming. A startle effect is
anything that triggers the brain into thinking that there might be an emergency
out there and alerts it to pay special attention to the source of the
disturbance.
Television
accomplishes this with sudden and dramatic changes of intensity of light or
sound and a rapid shifting of camera angles.
Eventually, however, the brain starts getting used to the situation,
realizing that these are just false alarms, and it starts to tune out
again. As a result, every ten years or
so the television industry has made the startles bigger and brighter, until
finally what we have are periodic bursts of violent imagery in children’s cartoons
and so on, to the point now where there are an average of sixteen bits of
violence every half-hour. Here the
nature of the program content does matter.
While the higher brain, or neocortex, knows that the images on TV aren’t
real, the lower, or “reptilian” brain does not.
This means that when a child views violence on television, the reptilian
brain sends a series of alarm messages up to the emotional brain, which in turn
immediately contacts the heart. The moment the heart receives any indication of
negativity or danger, it drops out of its usual harmonic mode into an
incoherent one, triggering the release of the single most potent hormone in the
human body, known as cortisol. Cortisol
instantly wakes up the brain and causes it to produce trillions of neural links
in order to ready the individual to face the emergency.
Then
as soon as the heart gets the message that the coast is clear, another hormone
is released to dissolve all of the new neural pathways that weren’t used to
make a quick, adaptive reaction to the perceived threat. The trouble with current-day children’s
television programming is that there’s never any let down, and the brain of the
average American child, who has watched 6 000 hours by the age of five, is
suffering a great deal of confusion as a result. The massive over-stimulus from TV is causing
the brain to maladapt in ways previously thought impossible. It is literally breaking down all levels of
neural development.
Dr
Byron Reeves of
It
is interesting to note that hyperactivity is exhibited in boys eight times more
often than in girls.9 Boys
are given very vivid models through male violence on TV. They are given strong messages to be tough
and ‘play it cool’ in the face of violence. With no acceptable way to release
or express the stress they feel, adrenalin pumped into their muscles may lead
to a hyperactive state where excess energy causes them to constantly move or
fidget. We have to remember that when
there is excess cortisol in the system, concentration and focus becomes
impossible, because our bodies are geared up to run from the perceived
danger. At such times, learning is very
difficult. The next step is that the
child is given a label – hyperactive, ADHD, ADD or Emotionally Handicapped. 10
It
is also very interesting to note that ‘learning disorders’ such as ADD, ADHD,
dyslexia etc. have only become as prevalent as they are today since the advent
of television and other media exposure.
More and more evidence is surfacing that condemns it as one of the
aspects that is negatively affecting our children’s development and ability to
cope in the classroom.
Some
examples of the neural damage in modern day children have been documented by
The German Psychological Institute who conducted a twenty-year study of 4000
children per year on children who have watched the average 6000 hours of
television by the age of six.
Researchers found that twenty years ago young people could distinguish
between 360 different shadings of a single color category like red or
blue. Today it’s down to about 130. That is over a 2/3 loss of their ability to
detect shadings of color. This is strictly a neuro-cognitive breakdown. The most serious change they uncovered was a
breakdown of the brain’s ability to cross index its whole kinesthetic/sensory
system. That is, more and more children’s sensory systems are acting as
isolated components in the brain and less and less as coordinated whole
gestalts.
When
they placed the young test subjects in a natural environment that had no
high-density stimuli, such as come from television, they grew very
anxiety-ridden, bored and tended toward violence. The final disturbing finding of the German
study is that there has been over the same twenty-year period, a 20% reduction
in the children’s awareness of their natural environment.
The Loss of Play
As
Joseph Chilton Pearce so beautifully puts it:
play develops intelligence, integrates the various parts of our brain,
prepares us for higher education, creative thought and taking part in and
up-holding a social structure; it also helps up prepare for becoming an
effective parent when the time comes.
Play is the very force of society and civilization, and its breakdown
will reflect in a breakdown of society. 11
Dr.
Phyllis Weikart, associate professor in the Division of the Physical Education
at the
“The
average child in the United States sees six thousand hours of television by
their fifth year, at which point, in the midst of what should be the high point
of their dreamlike world of play, we put them in school, prevent bodily
movement (most purposive learning is sensory-motor at this age), and demand
they handle highly abstract-symbolic systems (alphabets and numbers) for which
most of them have no neural structures at all.
Driven by nature to follow their models, they try and can’t. Their self-esteem collapses and failure and
guilt give rise to anger. Even after
beginning school, they continue their time-percentage of television viewing
unabated. They spend more hours looking
at television than attending school, and our national daily viewing time grows
year by year”
-
Joseph Chilton
Pearce.
The End of
“Educational
television should be absolutely forbidden.
It can only lead to unreasonable disappointment when your child
discovers that the letters of the alphabet do not leap up and dance around with
royal-blue chickens.”
- Fran
Lebowitz, Metropolitan Life, 1978
Our
visual system, “the ability to search out, scan, focus, and identify whatever
comes in the visual field” 13, is impaired by watching TV. These visual skills are also the ones that
need to be developed for effective reading.
Children watching TV do not dilate their pupils, show little to no
movement of their eyes, and lack the normal saccadic movements of the eyes (a
jumping from one point to the next) that is critical for reading. The lack of eye movement when watching TV is
a problem because reading requires the eyes to continually move from left to
right across the page. The weakening of
the eye muscles from lack of use can’t help but negatively impact on the
ability and effort required to read. In
addition, our ability to focus and pay attention relies on this visual
system. Pupil dilation, tracking and
following are all part of the reticular activation system. The RAS is the gateway to the right and left
hemispheres of the brain. It determines
what we pay attention to and is related to the child’s ability to concentrate
and focus. The RAS is not operating well
when a child watches television. A poorly integrated lower brain can’t properly
access the higher brain. Another concern
with colour television stets is that the color from it is almost exclusively
processed by the right hemisphere of the brain so that the left hemisphere
functioning is diminished and the corpus callosum (the pathway of communication
between the brain’s hemispheres) is poorly utilized (i.e., poorly myelinated). 14
Jane
Healy, in the book, Endangered Minds, wrote an entire chapter entitled “
Reading
a book, walking in nature, or having a conversation with another human being,
where one takes the time to ponder and think, are far more educational than
watching TV. The television – and
computer games – are replacing these invaluable experiences of human
conversations, storytelling, reading books, playing “pretend” (using internal
images created by the child rather than the fixed external images copied from
television), and exploring nature.
Viewing television represents an endless, purposeless, physically
unfulfilling activity for a child.
Unlike eating until one is full or sleeping until one is no longer
tired, watching television has no built-in endpoint. It makes a child want more and more without
ever being satisfied. 15 The cycle is never completed.
Maybe
the most critical argument against watching television is that it affects the
three characteristics that distinguish us as human beings. In the first 3 years of life, a child learns
to walk, to talk and to think.
Television keeps us sitting, leaves little room for meaningful
conversations and seriously impairs our ability to think.
Some Suggestions to Aid Our
Children’s Brain Development
·
Keep
the television turned off as much as possible.
It helps to store the TV away in a closed cabinet or closet. Out of sight really helps the child keep the
TV out of mind. Remember that what we do
serves as a role model for our children - we can’t really ask our children to
stop watching TV if we keep doing it. It
is recommended that you avoid television and computers as much as possible for
the first 12 years of your child’s life.
When the television is on, then try to
neutralize its damage. Select the programs carefully and watch TV with your
child so you can talk about what you see.
Keep a light on when the TV is going since that will minimize the
effects of the reduced field of vision and provide a different light source for
the eyes. Sit at least 4 feet away from the
television and 18 inches from the computer screen. Always go outside (to the park, woods, or
beach) after viewing television.
The same can be said for computers -
everything hinges on age appropriateness.
We must encourage children to develop the ability to think first, and
then give them the computer. After that the sky’s the limit. But if you introduce the computer before the
child’s thought processes are worked out, then you have disaster in the making. This is because the first twelve years of
life are spent putting into place the structures of knowledge that enable young
people to grasp abstract, metaphoric, symbolic types of information
·
Read
a lot of books to your children (especially ones without lots of pictures) and
tell your children stories. Children
love to hear stories about our lives when we were little or you can make them
up. Telling our children stories helps
to stimulate their internal picture making capabilities.
·
Encourage
spontaneous imaginative play, either alone or with other children. Allow children to create their own toys. Steer clear of non-creative, fully
constructed commercial toys.
·
Nature!
Nature! Nature! Nature is the greatest teacher of patience, delayed
gratification, reverence, awe and observation.
The colors are spectacular and all the senses are stimulated. Many children today think being out in nature
is boring, because they are so used to the fast-paced, action-packed images
from television. We only truly learn
when all our senses are involved, and when the information is presented to us
in such a way that our higher brain can absorb it.
·
Honor
care of other people, pets and objects.
·
Encourage
lots of movement and interaction with other children to develop playground
rules, sharing and the beginnings of altruistic behavior.
·
Have
children use their hands, feet and whole body performing purposeful
activities. All the outdoor activities
of running, jumping, climbing and playing jump-rope help develop our children’s
gross motor skills and myelinate pathways in the higher brain. Performing household chores, cooking, baking
bread, knitting, woodworking, string games, finger games, painting, drawing and
coloring help develop fine motor skills and also myelinate pathways in the
higher brain.
·
Pay
close attention to your senses and those of your child. Our environment is often noisy and
over-stimulating to the sense organs.
What a child sees, hears, smells, tastes and touches is extremely
important to his or her development. We
need to surround our children with what is beautiful, what is good and what is
true. How a child experiences the world
has a tremendous influence on how the child perceives the world as a teenager
and adult.
(Some of the above suggestions come from
Susan. R. Johnson’s article Strangers in
Our Homes: TV and our Children’s Mind’s
as well as Carla Hannaford’s Book, Smart
Moves, Why Learning is Not All in Your Head.)
Notes:
1 Johnson, Susan. R. Strangers in Our
Homes: TV and Our Children’s Minds in a
paper presented to the Waldorf School of San Francisco 1999.
2 Pearce, Joseph Chilton. Evolution’s End, Claiming the Potential of
Our Intelligence.
3
Centerwell, B.S. Exposure to Television as a
Cause of Violence. IN: G. Comstock
(editor), Public Communication and Behavior.
4 Meltzoff, A.N. Imitation of Televised Models
by Infants. IN: Child Development, 1988
(59), pp 1221-1229
5 Hannaford, Carla.
Smart Moves, Why Learning is Not All in Your Head. Great Ocean Publishers,
1995, page 172.
6 Seven-year statistical analysis study by Dr.
Brandon Centerwall at the
7 Christian Science Monitor, July 6,1993.
8 Healy, Jane M. Endangered Minds: Why Children
Don’t Think and What we Can Do About It.
1990
9 Biederman, J., S. Faraone, K. Keenan, D. Knee
& M. Twuang. Family Genetic and
Psychosocial Risk Factors in DSM-III Attention Deficit Disorder. IN: Journal of
10 Hannaford, Carla. Smart Moves, Why Learning
is Not All in Your Head.
11 Pearce, Joseph Chilton. Evolution’s End, Claiming the Potential of
Our Intelligence.
12 Weikart, P. Round
the Circle: Key Experiences in Movement.
13 Buzzell,
Keith. The Children of Cyclops: The Influence of Television Viewing on the
Developing Human Brain. 1998
14 Johnson, Susan R. M.D., Strangers in Our
Homes: TV and our Children’s Minds in a
paper presented to the Waldorf School of San Francisco 1999
15 Buzzell,
Keith. The Children of Cyclops: The Influence of Television Viewing on the
Developing Human Brain. 1998