| When I was a child it was Enid Blyton's books that met with strong moral objections from | ||
| parents and other opinionated adults. For the past 20 years or so, it has been television. By the | ||
| time I came to have a child myself - my daughter Jessica is now five - I had become familiar with | ||
| the whole range of critical comment, though I was not personally involved in the debate. | ||
| 5 | It did not take me very long to sort out where I stood, and for the present I feel entirely | |
| relaxed about it, though I suspect that I may have to look at the situation again when Jessica | ||
| reaches adolescence. | ||
| We are extremely fortunate in that she is by nature a physically energetic child, with an | ||
| inquiring mind, who usually has a good many other things she wants to do during out-of-school | ||
| 10 | time. But she does enjoy, and get a great deal out of, her viewing, and she also , like me, has her | |
| lazy side. And, just because she is articulate and bright, and reads well, it is easy to forget that | ||
| she is very young and impressionable, and easily frightened. So there do have to be a few rules. | ||
| In general, she may not watch more than an hour and a half of television on any one day, | ||
| though I rarely have to enforce this, because she rarely wants to watch for longer. She is not | ||
| 15 | allowed to watch programmes intended only for adults, the news and also Newsround; the latter | |
| is aimed at children but seems to me to include more than its fair share of the world's wars and | ||
| woes. | ||
| However, parenthood means compromise. And if my daughter is watching a program that is | ||
| not specifically aimed at young children but which is very suitable for family viewing - like a | ||
| 20 | naturalist series - I watch with her, so that I can try to explain any difficulties over vocabulary, | |
| answer simple questions, and be on hand to punch the Off button at any particularly | ||
| red-in-tooth-and-claw moments. | ||
| What I have come to appreciate very much over the past three years or so of being exposed to | ||
| a good deal of the television output for small children from most channels is that the sort of | ||
| 25 | programmes I would choose to have are precisely those that are available, and that the ones I am | |
| uneasy about are few and far between. | ||
| I recently met a father of three children who said that the only television they might watch was | ||
| 'educational', But his attitude omitted to take notice of something very important: sometimes | ||
| children simply need to relax, and they also need television which stimulates nothing other than | ||
| 30 | laughter. When my daughter comes home from school at four o'clock after a day during which | |
| she has been physically and mentally active, she needs to have a story told to her, as in Jackanory, | ||
| or to see other children letting off steam running obstacle races or playing silly watergames. We | ||
| Are the Champions. These programmes do not come under my heading of rubbish; in fact all | ||
| children need some of that, too. Peter Dickinson's famous essay 'On Rubbish' applies to | ||
| 35 | children's television as much as to children's books, its main point being that if they are ever to | |
| learn discrimination, they must have access to the banal and the trivial, as well as to the good. | ||
| An academic friend for whose good sense I usually have much respect would not let his | ||
| children have a television set until they had learnt to read , on the grounds that if they did, they | ||
| wouldn't. But my daughter learned to read at four with great ease, and will now, from time to | ||
| 40 | time, choose a book rather than a television program. To make reading the pill and television | |
| the jam is likely to lead to resistance to the former and addiction to the latter. | ||
| The main anxiety I do have about television is that it trivializes, reduces all experience, all | ||
| news, all human achievement to the lowest common denominator. That is why control needs to | ||
| be exercised over the number of hours a young child watches , why the quality and suitability to | ||
| 45 | its age and stage of development must be supervised. And why, if the child is to become a fully | |
| rounded person, it needs to have a great many other things besides television in its world. | ||
| The Listener, November 4, 1982 |
| Sir: I very much enjoyed the articles in THE LISTENER for 4 November, on children and | ||
| television. That is, apart from the one by Susan Hill, which really annoyed me. | ||
| At the age of five I was probably very like her daughter Jessica. I, too, was fairly bright and | ||
| 50 | found reading very easy, but I cannot pretend to believe that Jessica will be as 'grown-up' as I | |
| am at the ripe old age of 13. I do not watch a great deal of television now, but I watched | ||
| children's programmes for an ave rage of an hour and a half a day when her age. Mum sometimes | ||
| watched with me, but never stopped me watching anything that was designed for children. | ||
| Certainly never Newsround, which I vaguely remember starting - I was three at the time - and | ||
| 55 | which I watched enthusiastically until I was about ten years old. What harm did it do me? The | |
| news given was simple, interesting and gave an awareness, however slight, of what was going on | ||
| outside my cozy middle-class home. Jessica, and all the other children like her, will never have | ||
| this until their 'caring' parents stop treating them as lumps of nervous fragile jelly, and start | ||
| thinking of them as future adults. | ||
| Ruth Keily Bristol |