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#31
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Should you feel guilty if your children watch TV all the time? Probably.
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#32
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Should you feel guilty if your children watch TV all the time?Probably.
On Dec 20, 10:17*am, "Victor Velazquez" wrote:
"Pete B" wrote in message . com... In article , k- says... "Pete B" wrote in message r.com... In article , says... requires lots of TV time, that's fine. Or not - there are studies which suggest it damages the natural cognitive development of the children. Yes, but if you choose to do that to your kids, that's on you. Or society who doesn't care who has children - competent or not. A society that truly celebrates diversity will also celebrate the diverse ways in which parents raise its children. Indeed, such a society welcomes new religious fanatics, killers, criminals, murderers. We have to accept that we will create villains. *The alternative is one prescribed way for doing everything, which you may have noticed doesn't work so well in that it creates one omnipotent villain (usually the state) rather than many relatively ineffectual ones. Diversity - more ways to subpress thy enemy. One of the assumptions inherent in valuing diversity is that sub-optimal ways of dealing with whatever will fall by the wayside as the more optimal methods tend to demonstrate their effectiveness simply by being successful.. Note how few people beat their children nowadays! :-)- Hide quoted text - - Show quoted text - As much as people hate to admit it, it's another demonstration that blind evolution, for all its vast wastefulness, ends up with better results than directed thinking about things. Because sooner or later, either the well thought out plan will miss a really important flaw; or the random evolution will hit upon a really terrific but not logically obvious result. So, as you say, you end up with a lot of suboptimal product as the price, if you want to dig up the really effective techniques. |
#33
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Should you feel guilty if your children watch TV all the time? Probably.
"z" wrote in message
... As much as people hate to admit it, it's another demonstration that blind evolution, for all its vast wastefulness, ends up with better results than directed thinking about things. Because sooner or later, either the well thought out plan will miss a really important flaw; or the random evolution will hit upon a really terrific but not logically obvious result. So, as you say, you end up with a lot of suboptimal product as the price, if you want to dig up the really effective techniques. I think you put that much better! :-) |
#34
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Should you feel guilty if your children watch TV all the time? Probably.
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#35
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Should you feel guilty if your children watch TV all the time?Probably.... after all, the media is the scapegoat for everything; about timeyou accepted responsibility for your shoddy parenting
On Dec 17, 11:55*am, Taylor wrote:
On Dec 14, 9:18 am, Ubiquitous wrote: BY MEGHAN COX GURDON Here is a book that seeks to answer the question that burns guiltily in the back of almost every modern parent's mind: Am I a bad person for sticking my toddler in front of the TV so that I can get a little peace and quiet around here, already? Please note that this is a very different question from the one most parents would actually admit to asking, that one being the rather more high-minded: "Is screen time bad for little children?" With "Into the Minds of Babes," author Lisa Guernsey manages in a balanced, lucid and practical way to address both of these questions, along with other screen-related concerns--whether about TV, or computer games, or video-game consoles, or hand-held devices--that lurk worryingly because of the way people live nowadays. We are, after all, in the era of Baby Einstein, when multimedia packages are sold to the parents of newborns with the idea that infants may get an edge on their peers if they begin building "cognitive skills" and absorbing the rudiments of bilingualism before they've begun eating solid food. It is an era in which millions of small children spend all day apart from their parents in facilities that feature screens and are staffed by "caregivers" for whom English is not necessarily the native tongue. We live, furthermore, in a time of rising juvenile obesity and inactivity, in a country where children seem sometimes to have fallen wholesale into an alphabet soup of scary initials such as ADD and ADHD, afflictions for which frenetic children's TV shows and computer games have been partly blamed. Ms. Guernsey is not a purist, and she's not on a campaign. She doesn't ask us to consider what an Amish-style childhood free of screens might be like or how children raised in such an old-fashioned environment might compare with the legions of day-care kids goggling at "Dora the Explorer." Instead, she starts with the sensible assumption that most American families routinely make television and other screens available to their young children. That being the case, well, what about it? Relying on dozens of scientific studies, Ms. Guernsey explores the intricacies of trying to unpick the complicated weave of what goes on inside the head of a 1- or 2 1/2-year-old child crouched before a glowing screen. Can a person yet to speak in full sentences understand flashbacks or rapid scene changes? What about vocabulary? Will that child be quicker to absorb new words--or, having been overwhelmed, slower? How researchers go about forming conclusions is neither simple nor always satisfying, but a great deal of inquiry has been pursued in the past few years, and more is under way even as purveyors of dubious "educational" media are pushing electronic keypads into ever-younger plump little palms. It turns out that some children, particularly those in single-parent or low-income households, may benefit from some television programs ("Sesame Street," "Blue's Clues") but not necessarily others ("Teletubbies," "Veggie Tales"). What makes one show superior to another is almost chilling in its simplicity, given that TV commonly serves as a substitute babysitter. "The closer the product comes to simulating the way a good nursery school teacher or attentive parent talks to a young child, the better," Ms. Guernsey writes. A stunning number of families with babies and young children--39%, in one study--keep the TV on constantly. And the effect on small children is appalling: "Always on" television has been shown to damage their ability to play imaginatively and to develop language, and it reduces the number of nurturing interactions between parents and children. One researcher told Ms. Guernsey that little children trying to learn words in the presence of constant noise are "devastatingly impaired." Parents may not want to be told this--they can be prickly if they think you're criticizing their child-rearing practices. Ms. Guernsey uses her experience as the mother of two girls to deflect any sense that she's some sort of hard-eyed reporter-type coming to lecture weaker parents about their shortcomings. She knows how grueling it can be to spend hours with colicky infants and restless toddlers and to cast about for some way to distract them long enough for Mommy to take a shower. She is clearly hoping to smuggle in a few good parenting lessons by being nonjudgmental and more-culpable-than-thou. It's probably a smart approach for selling a worthwhile book. But I can't help wishing that Ms. Guernsey had been less understanding and more forceful, for what her extensive research turns up is hardly any recommendation for putting small children in front of screens, whether televisions, computers or electronic teaching gadgets. It is true that studies have found that toddlers show more recognition of numbers and letters when they've spent time watching "Sesame Street." And young children who watched "Barney" were judged to be more polite and socially cooperative than their peers who watched turbulent superhero shows. That's lovely, and good for them--though, again, we don't get comparisons with children raised in TV-free households. But over and over, Ms. Guernsey's findings point away from the beneficence of the screen and toward the irreplaceable value of loving and engaged contact between parents and children--and between children and their own imaginations. "It is play, plain and simple play, that affords many of the most essential intellectual and social advantages for children," Ms. Guernsey says, quoting from a book called "Einstein Never Used Flashcards." At another point she writes: "Video exposure is no match for the stimulation children experience in real life. Scientists have so far come up with nothing to suggest that babies are better off watching a baby video than, say, watching Dad fold laundry." Ms. Guernsey is tolerant and circumspect about what she has found. I don't have to be. If you have small children at home, please turn off that wretched TV. | Mrs. Gurdon writes about children's books for The Wall Street | Journal. You can buy "Into the Minds of Babes" from the | OpinionJournal bookstore. -- * It is simply breathtaking to watch the glee and abandon with which the liberal media and the Angry Left have been attempting to turn our military victory in Iraq into a second Vietnam quagmire. Too bad for them, it's failing. "Stern rules, man!" Ah, you're Stern fan! That certainly explains why you confuse the subject with the body of your postings and followups. |
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