How worried should we be by the warning from Aric Sigman of the British Psychological Society that television is seriously damaging to health? A survey of various studies of television-watching collated for Biologist magazine warns that it is linked to premature puberty in girls, sleep disturbance, metabolic disorders, attention deficit disorder, obesity, short-sightedness, poor educational and economic outcomes among the children most exposed, and Alzheimer’s.
Sigman also says that although the quality of the programs watched is a factor in some respects, the research tends to suggest that all screen-viewing has poor physiological effects. Yet, he argues, all screen-hovering is now running at epidemic levels. He maintains that 11-15-year-olds now spend 55 percent of their waking lives watching television or otherwise engaged in staring at screens. He reckons they are poised before a screen for seven and a half hours each day, on average, which is more time than they spend at school.
Sigman suggests that children under three should not watch television at all, that older children should be confined to an hour of screen-time a day, that teenagers should watch for a maximum of one and a half hours and that even adults should limit themselves to two hours a day. We do try to limit screen-based entertainment in our household, but the idea of policing our various screens to that degree fills me with panic. Rationing telly and computer games is already by far the most fraught area in my relations with my children.
Trying to explain to them that life without TV and computer games is possible is as difficult as getting across to teenagers that it was indeed feasible to organize a social life before the advent of mobile phones, or even landlines. Listening to myself banging on about the absence of video recorders, the complete nonexistence of television at any time except during the evening, and the closest thing to a computer game being getting my calculator screen to say “hELLO” upside-down inspires the kind of awed disbelief I used to experience myself when my mother used to tell me what it was like during the war.
Twenty years on, I get up in the morning to find that my children have switched on Cartoon Network, even though they’re Not Allowed, and marvel at the fact that I don’t know how to stop this junk coming into my home and into my children’s heads without actually just throwing the whole bloody contraption in the bin. This, of course, is a step more draconian than I could possibly take, because it would result in my children never stopping begging neighbors, friends and probably total strangers from letting them into their houses instead.
Sigman has been proselytizing about the evils of television for years. He claims that on a visit to Bhutan, the last place on earth to get telly, “I was appalled to discover that since the arrival of 46 cable channels, the country was experiencing its first serious crime wave”. He compares the lack of acknowledgement of the health implications of unfettered screen-watching to be a scandal similar to that perpetrated by the tobacco companies in the last century, and thinks that there should be similar health warnings about the imbibing of telly as there are about fags. I think we should be listening to him, just a bit, rather in the manner that he says we should be watching TV.
