The Perils of Television
“A mother’s hands are in the kitchen sink, deep in soap suds; her eye catches the oven clock. ‘Oops, the cake will be ready in four minutes,’ she mutters to herself. When she remembers that the baby should be awake soon, her two older children start arguing over who got to the club chair first. Desperate, the young mother cries out to the battling boys, ‘Go watch TV.’ The boys run to the television set and the dispute ends as soon as the TV is clicked on” (Rutstein 1). Many parents in today’s society have turned their parenting responsibilities over to the television. They use the television not only as a calming method but as a babysitter and, worst of all, as a teacher. The “Good old American Family” of the past is now dead and gone; it is now the age of technological and media advancements. Families are growing farther and farther apart, and they don’t even know it because they are so wrapped up in it themselves. The way that we now classify a family is entirely different than the classification system which we used in the 1950’s. The familial units no longer represent mother, father, sister, brother, and the two family pets. The word family now takes on many different and unique meanings. There is a
“According to the A.C. Nielson Co. (1998), the average American watches 3 hours and 46 minutes of television each day (more than 52 days of nonstop TV watching per year). By the age of 65 the average American has spent nearly 9 years glued to the TV” (www.catholiceducation.org). When trying to fathom what a statistic like this really means, one cannot help but imagine what they may have accomplished in those 52 days a year that they basically lost to the perils of television. In the 1950’s, people only watched a few hours of TV each week. In the time which they saved from watching the tube, they did many more productive things “according to a 1948 Roper poll, when people were asked what they did during their leisure time, their top 5 answers were: listening to the radio, visitation with friends, reading books, playing outdoor sports, and going to the “We have been conditioned to think that learning has to be a bore, taking place in a sterile classroom with a stern-faced middle-aged spinster standing over us, empowered
Some topics in this essay:
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Rose Larger,
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Approximate Word count = 904
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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