As I watched a cartoon version of the three little pigs on youtube this evening, I reflected on the important question of children and TV. My current stab at the question is the following. The world is real, and TV is “real” only insofar as in some way it points you to the world or heightens your experience of appreciating and understanding to the world. If you watch a good movie and say “yeah life is really like that” or “the certainly is what things would be like if X was the case (X being something either possible, like a meteor coming to smash Earth, or something impossible, like our world without a God), then that is all I mean by illumining your experience of the world. A movie is a mere fiction in and of itself, even a documentary. It is a represenation, a picture of something more real than it.My operative premise for what follows is that God is “more present” in the real world than in the “fictional world” of human creation. So if I want my child to be close to God, and experience God most directly (though indirectly through creation) as possible, then I want to bring the child close to reality. I want my child to know and feel that the really real world is the one outside the window, not the one behind the TV glass.
So my deduction to teach this ordering of the levels of reality: only let TV be experienced when a more real experience of the same thing as seen on TV is readily available, so as to allow the child to experience the relative unreality of TV by comparison. Example, watch a TV show about how to hit a baseball, then go outside and play with a real ball. I think it will be very clear the more fun experience with a baseball is with the real one and not the TV one. Another, watch a show about river ecology, then go to a river and walk around and see the things the TV spoke about and showed. The TV will be seen as the shallow and boring thing it is when compared with these more real experiences. Another, watch a movie about biking, then go outside to learn to bike on a real bike. Another, watch TV about the Egyptians, and go to a museum and see their artifacts (or better, go to Egypt!).
Now the other way to experience TV is as the relatively more real thing. This I think might bad because it will associate really-realness with TV. So if you read a book about the three little pigs, and then watch a cartoon about it on TV, that experience of the cartoon will be much more real than the book experience. The cartoon pigs are moving, talking, singing, dancing, etc. This is much more real than the pictures or mere words in a book. So if they have the experience of the three little pigs in a book way and a TV way, then TV will get credit for and be associated with “more real” or “real-er”. And this is bad, and can be hard to shake off if it grows into a habit.
So in sum, never let TV be “more real” or “most real”. Have it always be the “less real” but only showing on TV what can be compared with and experienced in the real world. Now, if you knew three accomodating pigs and a cooperative wolf, and the resources to stage a real enactment of the story of the three little pigs, then by all means show the cartoon, and then the real life enactment. But alas this would be difficult.
Still, are there any drawbacks to TV period? Some things I tend to think are best experienced as completely unprepared-for blasts of experience. I would not show a child pictures or video of the Grand Canyon, since I think the experience of it first-hand would be diminished by seeing it beforehand in a lesser form. But other things I do not think would not have this effect. Another way to go would be to experience the real thing first, then watch TV about it, then go look at it again. Then the TV can be seen as a tool for education, for helping us see things we didn’t notice before. In this way not only is it not supplanting our experience of the real world, it is aiding it, which is as any educational tool should be.
What about long movies and so forth? I have fond memories of the Disney classics and such things, but I currently think I will wait until I am convinced the child won’t be bewitched by the mezmerizing powers of TV. Until they are so interested in the real world that they will enjoy a movie, but it won’t be that big of a deal, and they get kind of antsy by the end of it. Maybe that will be obvious.
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