It’s
not that rare to witness a scene when parents, or elders-for that matter,
irrespective of how they are related to some kid, dishing out advice about how
much time a kid should spend in front of the TV.
The
reason they give for their aversion to the ‘idiot box’ is that there is too
much promiscuous or/and sinister activity being aired on TV these days, which
is bad for a toddler or a young boy/girl who has just stepped into
teenage.
That’s
a perfectly legitimate anxiety on the parents’ part. When harmones are
a-raging, watching ways of attracting the opposite sex in seconds could give
you pretty nasty ideas, which is bad when at that age you need to have your
wits about you and concentrated on academics and character building. so parents
are not totally wrong in imposing the frequent embargos on their child’s
liberty to watch whatever he likes. Mostly its like “only pogo, discovery, or a
news channel”. Sadly there might have been an oversight in this clever plan.
What
do you do , when in the middle of SHINCHAN, an AXE commercial is aired, or your
kid stumbles across a news being aired about a sex racket on the news channel
you recommend? You bubble of security is not as sound as you think it is.. !
And
its a very biased assumption that all television does is to corrupt young minds
and put ideas about violence and the ‘bad stuff’ in minds of the young ones. I
watch a LOT of TV and yes, occasionally I have come across inappropriate
content, but I have also learned a lot, and not only through Natgeo and
discovery. I learnt that Nokia is from Finland by watching Transformers; I know
what and where Harlem is and that people of Indonesia prefer a lot of spices in
their food; I perform really well in any audio based test because from
having an experience of watching Star World I understand what people with
different accents are saying; I fully understand the severity of 9/11 and its
impact on the world because I have seen almost every documentary ever aired
about it . And yes, I also know that Shahrukh has an unmarried sister; John
didn’t want to commit and that was the reason Bipasha broke up with him; but
entertainment is not that bad for the mind as people mostly assume it to be!
By
being exposed to such a lot of information people also can develop awareness of
what is good and what isn’t. None of my friends use AXE to have the ladies
swarming around. They use it because they want to be presentable. And about the
people who are ‘influenced’ by the advertisement (generally intersecting the
set of people who scream about the ill-effects of television), let’s just say
when the top bunk is that empty , just smelling good won’t get you
anywhere 
Its
still important to guide young people what to watch and what not because the
quality of content has degraded. But its a public medium and you can’t expect
your filters to be applied everywhere. The storm comes even if you close the
windows, if you stop your kid from watching it on tv, he will access it on the
net or his friends will tell him about it . What you can do is educate them
about some things you want to protect them from and information about why this
age is not suitable for knowing about those things.
Inculcate
their interests in the right things, so that they don’t migrate to the ‘banned’
channels even when you are not around, there is a lot of good stuff too. And
its not just the chemical formula of sodium carbonate that makes them an aware
person. Don’t put so many hurdles around them that when they finally break
through , you can bet they would try what you stopped them from trying earlier.
Now
that’s enough for today, Its time for me to watch some TV.
Call
me an idiot as i love that box!
Cheers!
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