The Effects of Television on a

Our generation has been raised in a technological advanced world and there has been definite controversy over many of these innovations that this new culture has brought. An innovation that has troubled the youth of America for many years is television. Although there is no certainty to eliminate this “plug-in drug,” there are many ways to control and monitor your television as a parent. Children between two and eleven years of age watch an average of 25 hours of television a week.(Children’s Television) Which means that children spend more time watching television than in school. With that statistic it is no wonder why this is such a huge problem that this nation has to deal with. There are many facts that show how children are effected by television. The most obvious is the effects that television has on the brain. “Television interferes with the development of intelligence, thinking skill and imagination.”(LimiTv) A huge element of thinking is taking from what you already know and deciding how it applies in different situation. School makes you do this, but television does not. Michael and Sheila Cole, sociologist, say that “Children socialized to learn from television had lower than normal expectations about the amount of mental effort required to learn from written texts, and tended to read less and perform relatively poorly in school.”(Development of Children 24) Which means that it takes very little effort to follow a television show and kids are raised on television believe that it takes less effort to learn from television rather than books because they have been “spoon-fed” information by television. “Opportunities for a child’s imagination to develop are also denied by habitual viewing.” (Neural Activity and the Growth of the Brain) Children need some unstructured time to Wise, 2 allow imagination skills to form by thinking about a book or