by Eva van Loon

Sing along to the advice I give inquiring parents who want to know What They Can Do to prevent or cure learning disabilities:

“Blow up your TV; throw away your sodas;
give away the Ritalin; try to be home;
get some music lessons; do a lot of dancing;
memorise the tables on your own.”

Many parents suspected those drugs anyway, and just knew they were right about piano lessons, memorizing, and the infamous “New Math” of the Seventies. It’s fun to watch them blench at the notion of Doing Without TV.

“But we only let the kids watch a little bit,” they invariably protest. “Only the good stuff.”

There is no good stuff. Seriously. It’s not the content; it’s the screen itself. Recent research vindicates what many have sensed all along: TV, however good the content, is toxic to children.

One study concludes that, for every hour of TV a child under seven watches daily, there’s a 10% greater likelihood of developing ADHD. So, if a child watches ten hours’ TV per day, it doesn’t matter if parents mute commercials and restrict content to education and nature channels. They’ll soon be dealing with ADHD (and paying therapists like me to fix it).

Another study notes that the human brain makes more high-confidence errors in a cluttered environment. That means kids making zillions of mistakes in video or computer games will still enjoy it, but kids making errors on a piece of paper or a single problem on an educational TV screen at school will be fighting to keep some self-esteem.

Finally, since 1974 my own experience with kids diagnosed with “Learning Disabilities” tells me that the majority have had very significant long-term exposure to TV and/or computer screens—and those are the same kids who haven’t developed normal visualisation skills.

Conclusion? Young humans should be severely restricted in access to TV and computer screens. Under seven years? No screens at all. Forget baby Einstein—the parent is far more important than Einstein or any teacher ever can be.

Go ahead. Blow up your TV. Let’s have a TV-blow-up party. Take that, Military-Industrial-Corporatocracy! One small step for a family—a giant step towards reclaiming our brains.